


She and He

by stayseated



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, F/M, Gluten Intolerance, Grey's parents, Kombucha, the slowest burn ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-08-20 18:52:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 70
Words: 268,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16561352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stayseated/pseuds/stayseated
Summary: A fluffy, generic love story about a boy meeting a girl. The one hitch is that boy has no penis. Grey/Missandei. (Romantic Comedy Mod AU)





	1. Grey moves to a new city

**Author's Note:**

> Here’s a Mod-AU version of Grey without a sad background of trauma and abuse because sometimes I get tired of torturing this poor guy. Here, he's super well-adjusted and generally happy! (Yayyyy.) The trade-off is that he just has no dick. (I've also have always wanted to write a Mod-AU version of him that legit has no penis, and I think today is the day!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't wanna read? Please check out kalipersephone's lovely voice in the [podfic version](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582885/chapters/41443676) of this!

 

 

  
He was 12 years old when it happened. He was being a silly idiot and messing around with his friends at school. He stuck his erect penis through a crack in the door because his brother only recently told him about what glory holes were all about and the very concept of glory holes was wildly hilarious to Grey because he was pretty immature at the time.

He stuck his dick out the slit in the door and told his buds to “kiss it.” He heard the sound of their giggling, before he heard feet and heard the rumble of thick footsteps.

And then he heard a very dramatic “ew!”

And then the door slammed right on his penis. Shock registered before pain did, but when pain came — there was already so much blood. He was screaming. His friends were screaming. They were all screaming their heads off until Ms. Needham rushed over to see what the commotion was about — and then she started screaming too.

Probably about two months later, over family dinner with his brother and folks, he was mostly healed, but still pretty tender. His dad clapped him on the back and fondly said, with randomness, “My beautiful, idiot son.” Their dad said that to release out this tension and this anxiety and this fear, actually. Their dad had gotten a crazy call while he was at work about a terrible accident that happened at his youngest kid’s school. For a freak moment, because of his line of work, Grey’s dad thought the worst — that his youngest son was dead. The actual truth of what happened simultaneously was kind of a relief — but also so weird and terrible.

He’s actually on the phone with his dad right now — his dad is trying to bitch about Azzie — as Grey nimbly navigates through a staggering line of weary travelers trying to filter through to baggage claim. His dad is military — or was military — his dad is a retired medical doctor — but they often talk about these things in the present tense — so his dad’s way of communicating is flat, blunt, and like a wrecking ball against a brick wall.

Azzie wants to move back the Summer Isles to find himself — to become a diving instructor or a surfing instructor or some sort of instructor — after three years of being a massage therapist.

“What was the goddamn point of sending him to massage school, then?” his dad’s griping voice says, grumbling into his ear.

“Dad,” Grey says, leaning to peer at the hole where luggage comes out of. “This is what you get — for naming him Azure.”

“Your mother did that,” his dad says flatly. “And it sounds better in the Summer Tongue! It makes sense in-language, Nudho.”

“My name sounds like nut hole if you say it wrong. Or nude, if you say it right. So thanks for that, Dad.”

“Did I fucking call you to get criticism for decisions that were made decades ago? Jesus, son. Stay focused. We’re talking about how your brother is a mess.”

There’s not much he can say about this. He and his mom are generally the mediator between his father and his brother. He has already talked to Azzie at length. Azzie is tired of the rat race — Grey has already pointed out that massage therapy isn’t really a rat race, and Azzie has already told his little brown-nosing brother to stop parroting their father. Azzie has already told Grey that there has just got to be more to life than money and amassing shit. Life is about living and loving and being happy. It all sounded like shit Azzie likes to say. And Grey was able to argue with none of it. Azzie is an adult. He’s allowed to do whatever the hell it is that he wants.

Their mom keeps telling him that their dad needs a hobby. Retirement is driving their dad nuts, which — in turn — is driving her nuts. She hasn’t retired yet — is years away from stepping away because she loves her job that much — but she keeps telling him over lengthy phone calls that his father is driving her insane. She keeps telling him to talk to his dad and convince his dad to learn how to play tennis or to golf or something. She keeps telling him it’s that immigrant mindset — it’s that immigrant work ethic. The man just doesn’t know how to calm the fuck down. Except Grey’s mom never swears, so she didn’t actually say “calm the fuck down.” She only strongly implied it.

Outside of the airport, Grey spots Drogo waiting for him outside of his truck — his hair long and wildly flying in the wind — skin tanned — and his body severely underdressed against the blistering cold wind. When Drogo spots him, a massive smile spreads across his face. Grey sees and hears Drogo shouting his name.

His dad hears it, too. His dad starts interrogating. He dad says, “Who is that? Where are you now? Who is picking you up? Is that the taxi driver? Wait, what the fuck am I saying — why would the taxi driver know your name? Wait, is it an Uber driver or Lyft driver? Make sure the license plate matches the app so that you don’t get into the car of a fucking murderer, son.”

“Dad,” Grey says, sighing, locking eyes with Drogo, who immediately grins and opens his arms. The security guard is actually yelling at the both of them for loitering, which is stressing Grey out. “I gotta go,” Grey says. “It’s not Uber — how do you even know what Uber is?” He means that his dad cannot even master video chat, so it is shocking that his dad knows what rideshare apps are all about.

Grey walks into Drogo’s back-cracking hug.

“I’m not an idiot, son. I read things. For instance, I read about a young women who was assaulted by a driver —”

“Dad, sorry, I really gotta go,” Grey says in a rush. “Drogo’s here. I’ll see you and Mom, and I’ll talk to you guys later. I love you.”

“Oh my God,” Grey’s dad says. “I don’t like that boy. Never have.”

They are thirty years old, but his dad still likes to call Drogo “that boy.” As in, “that careless boy that fucking shut a door on your penis.”

Drogo can hear bits of the conversation out of Grey’s phone — and it makes him miss Grey’s dad a little bit. As he grabs Grey’s lone suitcase — observes in surprise at how light it is — before throwing it in his backseat, Drogo shouts out, “Oh, hey, Dr. Torgo!”

In a deadpan, Grey says, “My dad says hi back.”

In Grey’s ear, his dad says, “I did not!”

 

 

  
Grey’s new company is covering moving costs, but the idea of Grey living out of a hotel until he finds a permanent place does not sit well with Drogo, so Drogo insists that Grey stay at his house for as long as his buddy needs to.

Grey mutters that a maid, a gym, a pool, and room service sounds terrible — yes. He also admits, “I was actually planning on staying with my folks after I get tired of the hotel, after I figure a few things out.” Namely, if he can get his new company to pay his parents rent for boarding him. And it’s not that his parents aren’t well-off enough, and it’s not like he doesn’t have money. It’s just — this is just the kind of stuff he does, if the options are open to him.

This only inspires Drogo to nudge him. Drogo says, “Remember Braavos?” before smiling widely.

They travelled down the coast of Essos during the summer before senior year of college. Leading up to the trip, Grey was being his typical self — paranoid, anxious, worried about imperfection, obsessed with the future, unable to decide on whether or not he was going to go to medical school — and Drogo thought that backpacking would bring his best friend clarity. Or at the very least — backpacking would just be a fun excursion they’d remember for the rest of their lives.

In Braavos, they were robbed, right outside of their hotel. Their passports, phones, and money were stolen by some young bastard punks with knives. It resulted in a long couple of days, a lot of phone calls made from the embassy. At the end of it, Grey’s dad called in a few favors through his connections and also flew over — to take care of things in person — and also to chew Grey a new ass hole in person.

Grey’s dad always made Drogo laugh. Because he doesn’t know how getting robbed at knifepoint was Grey’s fault at all — but Grey’s dad generally finds a way to make it Grey’s fault.

“Are you saying I’m going to get my shit stolen in broad daylight in downtown King’s Landing?” Grey calmly asks.

“Nah, that’s not what I’m saying,” Drogo drawls. “Downtown is pretty safe. I’m just saying — remember Braavos?”

Grey remembers months of traveling with Drogo — a lot of it was wonderful and some of it was incredibly claustrophobic. Drogo is talkative, fun-loving, and adventurous to the point of being reckless. Grey is a rule-following, quiet little bitch sometimes. Too much fun stresses him out sometimes. This is actually his fear, in staying with Drogo. He has a new job to mentally prepare for. He’s not sure that Drogo is conducive to focus at all. But it has been a couple of years since they’ve spent any significant time together.

“Stay with us a few days at least,” Drogo insists.

“Do you even have space for me?”

Drogo laughs with his head thrown back. He says, “Bud, I have so much space for you.”

“Did you ask your wife if it’s okay?”

“Man, she ain’t my keeper. I do what I want!”

 

 

  
Grey is gobsmacked by how _massive_ Drogo’s house is. His jaw drops when they roll up to the house — which actually might be a mansion. He peers out of the windshield and says, “Holy shit. Are you rich now?”

“Man, it was a good deal,” Drogo says, voice cracking a little bit. And then he says, _“She’s_ rich.”

Grey has met her a few times — and one of the times was at the wedding, too. She is a really busy person, so whenever he used to roll through town, Drogo showed up solo and they’d just reminisced about the good ol’ days. Reminiscing tends to result in one or both of them absolutely plastered and belligerent, so Drogo’s wife probably thinks that he’s a terrible influence on Drogo — not realizing that the reverse is actually more true.

She’s not home when they enter the house. The house is cavernous, pristine, very white and concrete-y. Drogo drags Grey’s one suitcase up the stairs and wonders out loud how Grey only has one fucking suitcase after moving across the continent. Grey tells him that the rest of his shit is being transported on the ground. It will be a week or two before the rest of his stuff arrives and gets put into storage, probably.

In the guest room, Drogo tosses the suitcase on the bed with a bounce — and then he assesses Grey. It’s the very first lull they’ve had since the flurry of activity at the airport.

Drogo blows out a breath. He chuckles. And then he giddily says, “I can’t believe you’re here! I can’t believe you’re here for good! I am so excited! I have missed you, man! I’m so excited you live here now!”

 

 

Drogo completely neglected to tell his wife that Grey is staying with them. He learns this when she gets home and sees an opened bottle of champagne between them — and looks at him like she doesn’t recognize him at first. And then she slowly says, “Grey,” after she recalls where she knows his face from. He was actually Drogo’s best man at the wedding — purely a figurehead. He lived too far away to actually do jack for Drogo.

Grey stands up to shake her hand — because he just doesn’t think to hug her. They are not that familiar. He says, “Hey, Daenerys.”

When Daenerys learns that he has moved to King’s Landing and that he is staying with them a few days, well, she and Drogo start to fight right in front of him.

Drogo is tipsy and thus, kind of hilarious as he punks his wife with terribly immature comments. She realizes that Drogo has been drinking, and it only makes her incensed. After a few minutes, Grey cautiously breaks in and says he doesn’t mean to cause strife — that he can easily just check into a hotel and get out of their hair.

At that point, Dany points a finger at him and tells him, “You stay there.”

And he does. He freezes.

To Drogo, Dany says, “Look, I don’t care if your friend stays with us. What I do care about is you giving me a heads up, instead of me showing up at home and you jumping out and saying, surprise! Like an asshole.”

“I am pretty sure I told you he was staying with us for a couple days,” Drogo says. And Grey knows this is a lie because Drogo literally made a spur of the moment, spontaneous decision to invite Grey to stay with them like, mere hours ago. Grey cannot tell if Drogo is trying to gaslight his wife on purpose or by accident because Drogo’s short-term memory is kind of bad.

 

 

  
Daenerys hands him a stack of fluffy white towels before she goes to bed, and he is kind of sure that she fucking hates his guts? He says as much to Drogo when they are alone again, and Drogo shrugs. Drogo says, “Nah, man — she’s suspicious of all new people. You ain’t special.”

Drogo is so glad that Grey is back that Drogo does not let either of them go to bed very early. He forces Grey to stay up late, even though Grey is jetlagged. He forces coffee down Grey’s throat as they sit on the couch and gab like hens. Drogo makes Grey tell him all about his life. Drogo asks about the old job, the new job, how his parents are doing, whether or not his brother is out of the closet yet —

“Man, he’s not gay,” Grey says tiredly. Because this is a really old joke born out of jealousy and probably competition. Grey’s brother is older and was always insulting the two of them and bossing them around when they were all younger. “As far as I know,” Grey adds. “He’s had more girlfriends than I’ve had.”

“Yo, speaking of — are you dating anyone?”

“Man, I’m really not,” Grey says, yawning.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not.” Grey pauses. “Well, actually, I do. I just moved cities for a job? So that was a huge life event that took up a lot of time and energy and stuff.”

Drogo stifles his own yawn. He says, “Okay, so I bring it up because Dany has a friend —”

“No.”

“No?”

“No thanks?”

“Huh?”

“Drogo!” Grey says, laughing deliriously now. “What about this is ambiguous? I’m not interested! And you are terrible at knowing what my type is.”

Drogo rolls his eyes. “I know your type, man. You like angry, bossy women with bad haircuts and body hair. You like women that remind you of your father.”

Grey cracks up. He grabs the nearest throw pillow — a yellow, tasseled one — and shoves it into Drogo’s face. He says, “You’re such a bastard.”

Drogo blocks the pillow with an arm. And not for the first time that night, he says, “God, I have missed you so much.”

 

 

  
She and Irri show up to Dany’s house with an extra latte. In Missy’s car, Irri fiddles with her phone and tries to scroll through her messages to find the text with the gate code to the new house. Missy has one hand on the steering wheel and the other dialing Dany.

They both basically arrive at the answer at the same time. Irri finds the text message just as Dany picks up the other line and Missandei asks, “What’s your gate code again? And do we have to press pound and stuff?”

 

 

  
Missy feels a little embarrassed when she and Irri loudly walk into the living room and find Dany’s husband and some guy sprawled uncomfortably over the couches, sleeping askew. She’s embarrassed in part because she didn’t buy coffees for them — and she didn’t expect to stumble onto this kind of intimacy. She’s the kind of person that averts her eyes when couples kiss each other goodbye in front of her.

Drogo, who had been snoring, snorts himself awake as Dany walks down the stairs dressed in yoga pants. She spots the coffee and gratefully hightails it to Missandei. She says, “Oh, thank you so much!”

Drogo blinks the sleep out of his eyes. And when he spots Missy and Irri, a smile lights up his face. He says, “Morning, ladies.”

And then he leans over severely to swipe at his friend on the loveseat. He smacks his friend on the face — Missandei winces — and the poor guy jolts awake.

Drogo says, “Yo, man. We have guests. Look alive.”

“Huh?”

“This is Missandei. And this is Irri! Remember, I mentioned her yesterday?”

“Huh?”

 

  



	2. The ladies go to brunch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, we get a little bit of Missy's backstory and kind of learn why she's not the one getting set up on with Drogo's buddy.

 

 

  
Missy watches in envy as Irri arches her spine a little bit and puffs out her very pretty tits in a way that looks utterly charming and sex positive. Irri shakes hands with Drogo’s friend and smoothly launches into a conversation with the guy, talking about things that would probably not come to mind immediately to Missandei — stuff like his name, where he’s from, how he and Drogo know each other.

Irri’s flirty ease makes Missy think back to the morning, when Missy opened up her pill box and started arranging tiny capsules in her palm. She recently added another medication to the suite — a thyroid medication to counter her hypothyroidism, a new development discovered through a blood test at one of her more recent visits to the doctor. The test was done when Missy casually told her doc that she hasn’t gotten a period in four months — but that’s not that weird, right?

Her doc said that was actually most definitely weird. And Missandei felt stupid over her apparent ignorance and stupidity — but really, Missy had meant that four missed periods is not that weird _for her_.

There had been a frank discussion of her body. Missy has finally found a doctor she likes, so she felt comfortable speaking up and saying that it can’t be hypothyroidism because she’s thin, and she doesn’t really have problems with weight gain? Her doctor told her that weight gain isn’t always a symptom.

They talked about her brittle hair. Her general weariness and lack of energy — an aspect of herself that she either attributes to genetics, or to the allergy medicine that she basically takes year-round because of her asthma — but apparently it can also be because of this new thyroid thing. They talked about the aches in her joints and the general weakness of her body — another set of things she’s lived with her whole life, so she isn’t convinced it has anything to do with hypothyroidism.

When her doctor brought up libido and depression, well, Missy had to laugh out loud. And after she sheepishly saw that her doctor was not laughing, Missy said that she hasn’t noticed decreased libido — but of course she hasn’t. And she hasn’t noticed increased depression — because, well, she _is_ depressed. She has only observed the normal sort of depression that she already contends with.

“Hey. What’s up? I’m Grey.”

Missy flicks her eyes up to his face only for just a split second. She’s awkward and easily embarrassed. She’s also bad at making eye contact with men because she grew up with her mom and dad constantly telling her that all men are would-be rapists. She had to miss all overnight school trips and shamefully lie about the reason why to her teachers in ways that were unconvincing. She had a hard time telling people her parents are just foreign and distrustful and don’t get how things work in this country. She had to live at home during college instead of going to her first choice, a prestige university far away, because her folks did not think she was ready to live on her own and avoid getting raped.

Now her parents want to know why she isn’t married and pregnant yet. Now her parents are worried that there might be something wrong with her — she might be mentally disabled or maybe a lesbian — and she might grow into an old spinster. Now her parents _really_ want her to have unprotected sex with a man. The trajectory of life is sometimes funny like that.

She swallows her spit, and she reaches out to shake his hand. His grip is firm, and his hand is warm. She says to him, “Nice to meet you.” She says this to him even though they have _totally_ met before. It took a bit to remember, but they met at Dany and Drogo’s wedding. He was the best man, and she was the maid of honor. Like, they actually walked down the aisle arm-in-arm together. But obviously, he does not remember, and she doesn’t really see the need to point this out.

Dany’s husband saves Missy from having to follow up “nice to meet you” with another snazzy comment. He cuts in blatantly and says, “Irri is a yoga instructor!”

So it’s like that.

Missandei actually takes a tiny step backwards, to give them more space — to give the cool kids more space.

“Oh, that’s funny,” Grey says — more to the room than directly to anybody. “My brother used to teach yoga, too. For about . . . six months?” He laughs, the sound of it easy and light. Then he says, “Okay, so you’d get why that’s funny if you knew my brother.”

 

 

  
They haven’t seen the house properly yet, so before leaving for brunch, Dany gives them the grand tour. Dany is a terrible tour guide. She leads them through rooms really quick and tells them just the facts. When she leads them into the office, she says to them, “This is the office.”

Dany’s husband takes it upon himself to take over. The tour then becomes elongated, a series of anecdotes about the things he and Dany have bitterly fought over, from paint color to carpet texture.

He also flippantly tells them the places that he and Dany have had sex in so far. At first, Missy thinks he’s joking — and then as they move toward the kitchen pantry, she realizes that he is probably not joking at all.

Both of their relative openness — the way Dany is pretty cool with her husband saying whatever he wants to say — the way the group of them are led into the messy master bedroom with unfolded laundry dumped in the middle of the floor — the way Drogo says, “Oh, man, I hate folding fucking laundry,” when he spots the pile instead of being embarrassed and asking them not to mind the mess, well, the entire thing is just wild to Missy. Unencumbered people are just nutty to her.

 

 

  
Missy always feels like such a douchebag whenever she interrogates the server, inquires about whether there is any gluten or dairy in the entree of her choice. Having a gluten-allergy is so hot right now, so a lot of waiters are knowledgeable and great with answering questions, but some of them assume there is some wolf-crying on her part, because they’ll rhetorically say stuff like, “It’s a sausage, do _you_ think there’s gluten or dairy in it?”

Sometimes milk powder is used in cured sausages. Sometimes soy sauce is used in sausage-making. Soy sauce has gluten in it. Gluten is actually everywhere — and Missy actually doesn’t have an allergy as much as she has an autoimmune disorder.

“Oh, I’ll just have the green salad with a vinaigrette,” Missy says, feeling sheepish because she can _feel_ the waiter’s impatience during this brunch rush.

“Actually,” Dany cuts in firmly, staring down their server. “I want to know if you have a dedicated fryer for non-gluten stuff. And do you have a separate gluten-free prep area? Is the fish gluten-free?”

Irri sometimes wonders out loud if Dany is _too_ bossy or bitchy and if Missy ever feels like Dany just steamrolls over people sometimes. The answer is yes, obviously, duh. But Irri’s feelings and interpretation of Dany is often different from how Missy interprets Dany. Right now, for instance, Missy is compelled to give Dany a small, grateful smile.

 

 

“So, Drogo’s friend is cute,” Irri brings up, apropos of nothing. “Not exactly my type, but still cute.”

“Don’t do it,” Dany mutters, snapping a thin cracker in half and then carefully dropping the two pieces onto her plate. She wipes her hand on her napkin and carefully reaches out to grasp the end of butter knife handle. She cuts off some fish and then scoots it onto a communal spoon. And then she plops it onto her cracker halves from up high. She is trying to stop herself from contaminating the oily sardine with gluten, because she and Missandei are sharing food. Dany has a tendency of ordering food that Missandei can also eat.

“Why not?” Irri asks.

“Because Drogo wants it to happen, and I don’t want Drogo to be happy,” Dany says simply, shoving a fishy mound into her mouth and chewing quickly.

Missy grins. “You’re a good wife.”

“I know, right?” Dany says, her mouth full. “He’s insufferable. And he’s sexist.”

“Um, why did you marry him again?” Irri asks, sounding a touch too serious.

Dany represses a sigh because sometimes Irri is tiring. She resists putting too much bite into her retort. She just says, “He’s nice to look at sometimes.”

“Dany, there’s more to life than good looks.”

Again, Irri sounds way too serious. It is like they are having two entirely different conversations.

Dany also resents being schooled on obvious shit — like, by a lot. This is why she flatly says, “No, there’s not. All that matters are good looks.”

 

 

  
Dany pretty much stops herself from dissuading Irri from going after Grey by blurting out that Grey has no dick. That is a really bullshit and dastardly thing to overshare about another person. It’s not their business. It’s his business. But a consequence of her good judgement and kindness is that she has to let Irri just annoy the shit out of her, that ditz.

She learned about the no dick thing pretty early on in her relationship with Drogo — when they first started dating and they were in the mode of telling each other everything about one another. On their first date, he told her about what he described was the most terrible moment in his life. He told her that he really fucking just did something that changed someone’s life — forever — just carelessly because he was an idiot kid. He told her about the guilt that he carried for years and years after the incident.

She actually didn’t hold this information that deeply in her head. She kind of remembered Drogo’s guilt and forgot about Grey’s body for the most part — until she and Drogo met up with their lawyer before the wedding to hash out the pre-nup and also to go over the will.

That was when she learned that Drogo already had a will. And in his will, he — seriously — bequeathed his dick to Grey in the event of his death. It was actually in there, in black and white.

And it wasn’t even a joke. Drogo didn’t have a lawyer draft up that will to be funny. He actually stared at her with gravity and told her that he’d like to transfer that bit from the old will to the new will that they are sharing. He also retroactively asked her if she was like, okay with it?

“Like, he’s not as thick and built as the type I typically go for,” Irri says. “He’s kind of thin. But he has a really nice face.”

“You don’t even know anything about him,” Dany says.

“But that’s the point of dating someone, isn’t it?” Irri says. “To learn more about them.”

 

 

  
Drogo wants to tag along with Grey when Grey visits his folks. Drogo says it’ll give him a chance to swing by his mom’s house real quick. It will also give him a chance to say hi to Grey’s dad because he hasn’t seen that guy in years.

“He doesn’t like you, man,” Grey explains patiently.

“Man, you know I’m mesmerized by people who don’t like me,” Drogo says. “I mean, look at who I married.” He tosses one of his thick jackets right into Grey’s face because Grey packed his suitcase like a real idiot. “Come on, man, it’ll be fun to hang out in your old bedroom again. We can reminisce. I’ll drive.”

“Obviously you’ll drive,” Grey says, shrugging into the coat, getting engulfed by it. “I don’t have a car here.”

 

 

  
When his parents spot him and Drogo walking up the driveway through the window, his mom completely loses her shit. He can hear her excited shouts from inside the house. And Grey is also relieved that his dad is dressed and not lounging around on Saturday in the buff.

His mom crushes him in her arms and starts peppering his face with smooches. She is telling him that he looks so good and healthy, if slightly underweight. He can hear Drogo kind of laugh behind them. Grey can also feel his dad’s shadow skirting on the edge on this interaction.

When his mom lets him go, he looks at his dad — more gray hair, a little bit more wrinkles maybe — but also unerringly consistent. He remembers when his dad got a promotion at work and was pissed over it because it was more of an administrative post. As head of a department, Grey started seeing his dad less and less because his dad started keeping really long hours, coming home only after dark. Grey remembers that as tired as his dad was after work on some days, their one consistent ritual was bedtime stories.

“Dad,” he says.

“Son,” his dad says.

And then his hot eyes sting as he feels his body get pulled inward by a firm strength and a hard grasp on the elbow.

His arms come around his dad’s back, and he grasps onto pliable flesh and also bones.

His dad also says, “Holy shit. You _are_ thin. Are you on a diet?”

 

 

  
As his mom starts dropping some serious pans of food onto the kitchen table in front of him and Drogo, his dad starts grilling him on his body and his habits and all of it. His dad wants to know what he’s been eating, the regularity of his poops, the consistency of his poops, the color of his pee, how he’s been sleeping, what he estimates his stress levels and anxiety are at, whether or not he’s been exercising — how often he exercises.

This is normal. Grey gets that his dad was a doctor and a scientist. Grey also gets that after the whole penis-in-door incident, his dad generally keeps a closer eye on him than on his brother. Grey faithfully answers the man’s questions in the way that his dad likes his questions answered — just the facts, no editorializing.

“Are you still masturbating regularly, son?”

Drogo immediately starts cracking up, his face pitching forward toward his, for now, empty plate.

Both Grey, his mom, and his dad ignore Drogo.

Grey frowns. He shakes his head a little bit. He says, “Dad — I see my doctor like, all the time. It’s all good. In the hood — under the hood.” He refrains from telling his dad that he recently had a UTI. Because it’s old hat, and he doesn’t want to color their reunion with a lot of discussion about a UTI.

“Yeah, yeah, okay. You’re a grown man. Point taken,” his dad says gruffly. “You excited about the new job?”

“Kind of? I mean, a little nervous. I have a little bit of imposter syndrome feelings about it sometimes.”

“You’ll do fine, baby,” his mom offers. “You’re so smart and talented. That’s why they hired you.”

His dad is pointing at him. In complete contrast to his mom, his dad says, “You _should_ be worried. I told you about the boards, right?”

“Yeah,” Grey says. “Many times. You’ve told me many times.”

“Yeah, it was fucking carnage,” his dad says. “That’s why you generally want to just ace shit the first time around through preparation and due diligence. At the same time, don’t put so much pressure on yourself — you were always such an anxious kid. You make a mistake and what happens? World doesn’t end, son. A billionaire doesn’t make as much money as he could? Twerpy teenagers can’t log onto their favorite porn site on the first try? I tell ya, when I fucked up, people died. Hell, even when I was not fucking up, people died. Now that was life, son.”

“Dad,” Grey says slowly. “I don’t think you know what my job is.”

 

 

  
Grey’s dad does not like Drogo very much — and not really because of the penis-in-door thing because they all get that terrible accidents happen, and Drogo felt awful about it — Grey’s dad’s dislike of Drogo stems more from the fact that a lot of who Drogo is flies in the face of what Grey’s dad's values and likes. Such as studiousness, hard work, diligence, austerity, discipline, self-regulation, efficiency — stuff like that.

Plus, Drogo introduced Grey to alcohol and recreational drugs. Though, against his dad’s most fatalistic predictions during Grey’s turbulent teenage years, Grey did not turn into a heroin-addled gangster at all. He turned into a normal guy with a pretty normal life.

Grey’s mom has a great tolerance for Drogo. She likes him a lot because she has witnessed Drogo’s general devotion to her son. She believes that Drogo is a good friend to Grey.

Drogo plops onto Grey’s old twin bed in his old bedroom. Grey actually winces as the bed frame makes a cracking sound and the bed springs creak. He says, “Don’t break it, please. My dad will be so pissed.”

Drogo chuckles. He says, “Deja vu. And with that statement, I was suddenly transported back in time.” He’s lying down on the bed — taking up the entire mattress pretty much — with his hands folded behind his head. “Are you really thinking about moving back in with your folks? Won’t that be like — you know — intense?”

Grey crosses his arms and leans against the closed door to his bedroom. Without much lead-in, he tells Drogo, “My dad had thyroid cancer.”

Drogo immediately sits up. Then he says, “What?”

“Yeah, he underwent surgery for it last year, and he and my mom didn’t tell me until after it was over and done with.” After a pause, Grey answers Drogo’s unasked question with a wave of his hand and says, “It’s a very survivable kind of cancer. That was their excuse, actually. They did what they did because they didn’t want to scare me with shit until they knew there was something to be scared of. They didn’t tell my brother, either.”

“Wow,” Drogo says, shaking his head. “That’s fucked up.”

Grey shrugs. “Yeah, I was upset about it, but it’s in-character for him. So yeah, that’s why I applied for a job here — it’s kind of why I’ve moved back. It’s like — I don’t want to miss these things, you know?”

 

 

  
Irri is kind of old-fashioned, so she doesn’t believe that women should ask out men ever in practice. Theoretically, it’s a great idea and she’s all for equality. In real life, she would never do it. Rather, her preferred mode of scoring dates is to strongly hint to men that she is interested in them and then she beautifully smiles and agrees when men suggest that they go grab a bite together sometime.

Dany is over it because Drogo is gross, and Irri is gross. Drogo just wants his friend to get laid, and he zeroed in on Irri because Irri is indiscriminate and promiscuous. It’s a real asshole reason.

Irri is gross because Irri does not even care about the potential for this to get awkward and weird for Dany. Irri does not care that there are thousands of men out there in the city who are not Drogo’s best friend. What will happen when it doesn’t work out? Because it is not going to work out.

“Just give him my number,” Irri suggests.

“No,” Dany says. “I don’t want to.”

 

 

  
The house is empty and quiet when they get back from brunch. Missy quietly lets her friends know she needs to use the bathroom. She refrains from telling her friends that her stomach kind of feels weird — not like she was accidentally glutened — but for some other mysterious reason.

She sits on the toilet with her underwear around her ankles for about five minutes as her stomach clenches in an ache — and nothing comes out of her butt.

She gives up after another minute. She pulls up her pants and then runs her hands underneath warm water. When she opens the bathroom door, Dany is there, leaning against the railing over the staircase with a bottle of water. She says, “I told Irri to scram and go home. She wanted to give you a hug and kiss goodbye, but I told her who knows how long you’ll be in the bathroom.” She smiles slightly. And then she holds out the bottle to Missandei.

Missy takes the bottle and uncaps it. She says, “Thanks.” Then she takes a swig.

“Are you okay?” Dany asks. “How are you feeling today?”

“Honestly? A little tired.”

“Wanna take a nap?” Dany gently suggests. She suggests it because Missy’s apartment is over half an hour away by car, longer with traffic.

“Like, together?”

“Um, I was actually thinking I’d make up a nice bed for you. But sure, we can sleep together, if you want. We can pop in a movie and crawl into my bed together.”

The soft, sweet tone is so rare and so reserved coming from Dany. It’s a tone that comes out on special occasions. Armed with this knowledge, Missandei actually has to blink back a few hot tears — because it’s all so nice, and she’s just so pathetic.

“Nah, it’s alright,” Missy says. “I think I’ll just head home.”

“You sure? I can also call you a cab so you don’t have to drive? We can figure out a way to fetch your car for you later.”

A thing about Missandei is that due to the early years of not being believed — due to years of skepticism from her parents who lamented over their physically weak child and skepticism from medical professionals who said her issues were largely psychological — which was a terrible thing to say to her immigrant parents because they didn’t believe in mental illness — Missy now has a really hard time letting people take care of her. She has a hard time accepting what she qualifies as “charity” in her head. Part of the reason she was actually so attracted to Dany’s personality initially was that Dany didn’t treat her like she was breakable.

Weighing the cold water bottle in her hands, Missy says, “I’m sure. I can drive home.” 

 

 

 


	3. Everyone goes to a fancy party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei is awkward with men. Grey gets macked on. Drogo is charming. Dany hates that she has to be the only truth-teller in all of the land.

 

 

  
Grey actually works in cybersecurity, which is why his dad always brings up porn whenever his dad talks about Grey’s work. Grey’s an information security architect. He consults on solutions to protect data, through analyzing security threats, development of security hardware and software, and through designing policy and education. He currently just got a new job at a startup consulting firm.

That is his short bio that he tells at parties when people ask him what he does for a living. His job is actually far more complicated than this, but it is also boring to people who are not immersed in it. When people ask him how he got into this line of work, he further simplifies and jokingly tells people it’s three-fold: his parents were born in a different country and immigrated to Westeros, his dad was in the military, and Grey was too dumb to be a doctor. Those are the reasons.

And when people look bemused, he shrugs and kind of lies. He says he just always had an interest in computers and stuff, when was young. That’s the sort of answer that sits well with people.

Every company has its own jargon, and his new company is no exception. His first week starts off slow and careful — he gets taken out to lunch by his bosses a lot, just to shoot the shit. He meets with a lot of different people, just to become familiar with faces and names. He plays the game and smiles and is affable — even as he just itches to do some _actual work_ — he’s itching to prove himself because he is always compulsively trying to prove his worthiness to people. He used to blame his dad for creating this trait in him, but he has come to realize that who he is isn’t his dad’s doing at all. The way in which people become who they are is convoluted, random, and pretty mysterious. People often comment on how different Grey is from his brother — and they had the same exact parents — so he doesn’t know why.

His salary is hefty because the cost of living in King’s Landing is high. He cuts his parents a check for letting him live with them. He is surprised when his dad snatches the check out of his hand because he expected his dad to reject his money, actually.

He buys Dany a massive bouquet of lilies. He takes Drogo out to a steak dinner. He starts pocketing everything else in his savings account because he is diligent and he honestly does not know what else to do with his money.

He thinks four days is enough time to be an imposition, so he says goodbye to Drogo with a bracing, squishy hug like they are not going to see each other in six hours — and he walks out of the mansion to see his dad waiting for him next to a Prius. His dad is looking up at the house in detached wonderment.

His dad waves to Drogo as his dad asks Grey, “Is he a drug dealer now? Holy shit.”

 

 

  
His parents know exactly why he moved back home — they know that he is being sentimental, that he is trying to bond with them before one of them randomly dies — and they do not give him props for being a good son whatsoever. Which is one of those things he appreciates about his folks.

He spends the first week being a workhorse for his dad with projects around the house. He winterproofs the windows. He pulls out rotted wood boards out from the side of the shed and rebuilds the wall with treated lumber. He climbs up on the roof and cleans out the gutters in the bone-chilling ice-rain, because there’s a clog that needs to be looked at. He trims tree branches and chops bigger bits into firewood that he stacks on the side of the house. He discusses summer projects with his pops — caulking the siding, repainting the house, maybe re-shingling the roof — but that can probably wait another season.

Grey immediately feels reinstitutionalized. He immediately feels like he is sixteen years old again. And it’s not that he doesn’t have a good relationship with his folks because he does. It’s because it’s hard to go back to live in the family home. It’s hard to go back to the place that was such a bummer at one point in his life because of health issues.

Grey finds that his dad keeps very early hours — a lifelong habit. He tells his dad that he’s retired now. Sleep in and relax.

“It’s not relaxing for me to loiter in bed when the sun is up,” his dad retorts. His dad is fiddling around underneath the sink because the faucet is a little bit loose.

 

 

  
Over a quick bite in between meetings, she wryly tells Tyrion about how an insanely gorgeous white guy with wavy dark hair smiled at her while they were waiting in line for sandwiches the other day. She was waiting for Yara, who was a little bit late, so she let him cut in line. He asked her if she was sure. She told him it was totally fine. And so he took her place in line, put in his order, and then smiled at her after he took his number. He leaned against the wall and asked her for her name.

“And then I gradually wore him down with awkwardness and made him feel like I thought he was an assaulter who was bothering me — until he got his sandwich and just cautiously wished me a good day,” Missandei finishes.

Tyrion smirks as he flips his tie over his shoulder, before he peels back the paper on his gyro. “So the thyroid medication . . . is making a difference?”

“Yeah,” Missy says. “My loins are totally on fire now.”

He snickers as he takes a big bite, as meat juices and tzatziki drips down onto his paper plate.

This is a restaurant that Missandei has vigorously vetted, many times over. She has never gotten sick eating here. She always gets a gyro salad — the meat totally doesn’t have gluten in it, as promised! — and she orders it with a vinaigrette on the side. They also have a dedicated fryer, so she often gets fries here, too.

“Listen,” Tyrion says. “If you want a date, I know people. I can introduce you to some nice guys.”

“I don’t want a date,” Missandei says defensively. “I just want to to have a crush. I just want to feel the butterflies. I just want to feel like I’m capable of being excited about someone.”

“What are you? Thirteen years old?”

 

 

  
The next time he sees her is at a pre-wine benefit for the hospital. It’s actually a preview event for a fundraiser. Drogo explains this to Grey with a half smile — that they are going to unveil bottles and a decadent vacation package before the real auction next month — because rich people shit is just dramatic and bananas. He tells Grey to come because there will lots of amazing free food and free booze. He also assures Grey that while she will be there, it is not a setup at all. It’s just a group thing. A bunch of their friends will be there. Just see what happens — or doesn’t happen. No big deal.

Grey likes how subtle Drogo is. And Grey ends up going because he is going a little stir crazy, being cooped up in a house with his parents. He actually sneaks out of the house when his parents are watching TV in the living room because he does not want his folks to see him all dressed up for some reason. He doesn’t want them to think he is doing fancy shit because they will ask him questions about it.

He sees that she’s wearing a silver cocktail dress when they first cross paths. He knows that her friendly, flirtatious nature is not something he’s making up in his head, when she smiles at him and says, “Hey, Dapper Dan! You clean up real _good.”_

 

 

  
She ends up wearing one of her old standbys — a fitted black dress with a scoop neck that shows tasteful cleavage. She has an epic internal debate about whether or not to wear red lipstick with it. She ultimately decides not to because she’s going to just spend the whole night scared that she has smeared lipstick all over her face in the course of eating and drinking. This is why she just applies lip gloss.

When she shows up to Dany’s house to carpool, Dany’s husband warmly tells her that she looks really beautiful — and she blushes so fucking hard because she is sure he is just saying that to be charming, which is like — mission accomplished, good job.

Missandei can only drink organic wines with no added sulfites because sulfites give her a tremendous headache — and she finds that this is the perfect place to be for that. There are a bunch of wine nerds who can gab at length with her on organic wines. There are also a bunch of food nerds who can explain to her, at length, what is in her food. It is heavenly, actually.

She hears a low masculine chuckle behind her. She hears him say, “Let me help you with some of that, Missandei. Damn.”

She looks down at her arms and hands, balancing a glass of red with several tiny plates of hor d'oeuvres.

 

 

  
Grey constantly has to overanalyze how he feels and compare it what is probably objectively happening. His habit of doing this is based on teenage self-consciousness, years of locker room-based fears, most of which are unfounded, actually. He also does this because whenever he got moony-eyed as a kid, his dad was there to punch him back down to reality. One of his dad’s favorite phrases is, “You gotta think critically, son, Jesus Christ.”

He’s trying to figure out just how charismatic this woman actually is, for instance, or if he’s just allowing himself to get tricked because she is very pretty. It has happened before — a lot. He’s older now and he’s utterly tired of wasting his time on people who are insecure in themselves. Yet, he is also afraid of being jaded and pessimistic about people. It is all a balancing act.

She laughs a lot. He thinks that she looks great when she laughs. In particular, she laughs at the things he says a lot, which he likes. She is forward and clear — which he is simultaneously attracted to and fears. She coyly says, “I’ve been thinking you, ever since we first met.”

He smiles as he sips from his glass. Because this part is the easy part. He says, “Oh really? What have you been thinking about, in regard to me?”

“Your eyes.”

Oh, bullshit. He says it out loud, too — as a test. He says, “Bullshit.”

She laughs at that — like he is effortlessly hilarious and like she has just unburdened. She says, “No, really! Your eyes, your face, your hands.”

“Oh my God,” he says, downing the rest of his glass. He’s shaking his head. He’s a little buzzed. For a freak moment, he considers just blurting out his situation to her — and seeing how fast she runs away from him — just to be really hilarious about it. However, he decides to refrain. He says, “You’re funny, too.”

“Did you think about me?” she asks, leaning into him.

“Sort of,” he says honestly.

“What did you think about?”

“Um, your eyes?”

 

 

  
Missandei laughingly stoops down a little in her heels as Tyrion simultaneously reaches up and starts consolidating some of her tiny plates together, to free up space. He says, “Way to pace yourself, honey.”

She says, “You know I get excited when stuff is free.”

“Ah, yes, a byproduct of growing up poor,” he says flippantly — a recurring joke of theirs. He’s rich and white and male. She’s not. They’re the quintessential odd couple. Repeat it ad infinitum.

After taking a stack of empty plates from her and placing them on a nearby cocktail table, Tyrion smooths his hand down his silk tie before he picks up his wine glass again. He’s not even looking at her — he’s surveying the room — as he says, “You look very pretty tonight.”

 

 

  
Irri punches her phone number into his phone at some point. She boldly does it in front of his face, and she also tells him that he better call her and offer to take her out. He is kind of stunned at her guts and her willingness to contend with rejection. He then realizes — looking up and down at her body — that she probably doesn’t have to actually contend with rejection all that much, that this is probably just normal for her.

“I’m not looking for anything serious,” he blurts. “I’m not — I’m not looking for someone. I — I just — we can be friends.”

She must think that he’s playing some game. Because she says, “I wanna be friends with you, too.”

She kisses him on his cheek when she says goodbye to him. When she says goodbye, his hand automatically comes up to touch her spine. She smells good and her body is warm — and he quickly thinks about what her skin would feel like underneath his fingertips.

 

 

  
When it’s time to part ways for the night, Tyrion slaps a high-five into her hand and tells Missandei that he’ll see her at work. He tells her that he’s excited to watch her tickle Stephenson’s balls with an open-mouth. He says it so loudly that it definitely embarrasses her — which is definitely his intention. He laughs at her as he grabs his keys from the valet. He waves goodbye at all of them, leaving Missy to explain herself — or not.

She chooses not to. She avoids Drogo’s amused look and mutters, “It’s a stupid inside joke, and Tyrion’s an asshole. Stephenson is a project manager on our team. He’s socially awkward. Tyrion’s not very nice to the guy. Oh my God, I am explaining too much.” She’s pressing her hands together, almost like in prayer. And then she huddles deeper into her jacket. She can see her breath manifest in puffy clouds in front of her. She is shivering.

Dany’s husband gives Missandei the front seat. He insists on it. After he crawls into the back, he leans forward in between her and Dany so that he can punch at some buttons on the car’s console. Missandei realizes belatedly that he is turning on her seat warmer and cranking up the temperature. Missandei can smell his aftershave, and she is thinking, what the hell — this guy is just so freaking smooth. No wonder Dany married him.

Missy clips in her seatbelt. She smears her hot cheek against the material.

“Did you have fun?” Dany asks her softly, pulling the car into reverse.

“I actually had a lot more fun than I expected to,” Missy says honestly. “The food was so yummy.”

“Good, I thought you’d like it.”

“Thank you!” Missy says. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“Of course.”

Missy feels the back of her seat kicked a little, as Drogo twists and jostles around back there. She shuts her eyes and lets the soft sway of Dany’s driving kind of float her off to a relaxing place.

She hears Drogo say, “Couldn’t help but notice that you and Irri had a lot to talk about.”

It takes her a beat to realize that Drogo directed that comment only to Grey. And Missandei can _feel_ Dany apply a lot of effort towards keeping her mouth shut, towards keeping herself from voicing disapproval.

Missy also hears a throat get cleared. And then she hears, “Yeah. We had a nice chat.”

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Stuff,” he says. “Work stuff. Life stuff a little bit.” And then he pauses.

“What?” Drogo prompts.

“No, nothing. She’s seems really nice.”

“No seriously — what were you going to say?” Dany blurts. And Missy smiles privately to herself, because Dany managed to stay quiet for like, half a second.

Missy hears Grey’s laugh come out quietly. She hears him say, “Sheesh, guys. Interrogators.” And then she hears him say, “I don’t really understand what’s driving the interest here. Do you guys just think that she and I have a lot in common and we can just carry on a conversation together for hours? Like — do we seem really compatible or something?”

“Oh my God, that’s what I was saying to Drogo!” Dany snaps, and the car jerks just the teeniest bit.

“Holy shit, babe,” Drogo says, dramatically grabbing onto Missandei’s headrest. “Can you stop yourself from killing us?”

Dany ignores him. Instead, she clarifies even though no one is really asking her to. She just expands on her thought because she’s been itching to win this argument, once and for all. She says, “I think Drogo is being completely superficial because your guys’ commonality is a general sameness in attractiveness. Like, that is _it._ Like, I love Irri. She’s one of my best friends. But she’s not very bright. ”

That makes Missandei uneasily laugh in shock — and she has to muffle it with her hands because she might be drawing too much attention to herself.

“That’s mean,” Drogo says.

“It’s mean to say the truth? Like, we all know this,” Dany continues. “Irri is a bit of a ding-dong.”

“She didn’t seem particularly . . . not-smart when I talked to her,” Grey offers. “She seemed cool. She said some quippy things.”

“Babe, you are so fucking elitist sometimes,” Drogo continues. “Not everyone has to be rocket-smart.”

“Well, _obviously,”_ Dany says in derision. “I’m not saying round up all of the dumb people and burn them to fucking death. I’m saying — Grey is smart. Why would Grey want to hang out with a woman who once thought that unicorns were real, but just extinct?”

“I think that was a joke,” Missandei interjects, remembering the incident Dany is referring to. “I think she was making a joke. I don’t think she actually believed that unicorns were real.”

“Missy, whose side are you on?” Dany says witheringly. “She’s dumber than you, and you know it.”

“Um, that’s not really something I think about —”

“Babe,” Drogo says to Dany. “I don’t think you understand humanity. I don’t think you get that a criterion for sexual attraction for men is not like — it’s not IQ points, babe. I mean, I didn’t get with you because you’re smart. That part was an _accident.”_ Toward the end of the statement, his voice sounds a little strained. And soon after, he can’t hold back anymore. He just starts cracking up, loudly laughing at himself and smacking the back of Missandei’s headrest with his fist repeatedly. He says, “Jesus, Dany, do you realize that you just repeatedly argued that one your best friends is an idiot? Like, that’s the hill you wanna die on?”

On her end, Dany is just _sick_ of everyone ganging up on her — she’s fucking sick of the _persecution_ — she’s fucking _sick_ of these goddamn truth-haters. She shouts out, “Fine! Forget it! _Fuck!_ Can’t even say a goddamn thing without everyone jumping down my throat!”

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Missy's week

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A week in the life of Missy. She goes to work, tries to work on her leadership, goes to therapy, examines her issues with men, has dinner with her family, and chats on group text with her buds!

 

 

  
She had these modest blemishes on her face that she kept compulsively picking at until they became bleeding scabs. Now, she wakes up every morning before work and applies a crapton of concealer over the spots. Now, she wakes up every morning, looks in the mirror, and wonders exactly when she’s going to have all of her shit together as she brushes her teeth.

She is required to be apart from her team for the entire work day because she has to attend a day’s worth of leadership training. It’s training tailored to women of color. It is very specific training, and Tyrion kindly pushed it on her for reasons that are probably kind of half-cocked. He pushed it on her based on bullet points, probably. He pushed it because she has what he has described as a humility problem.

The training is supposed to last for six months. She gives up an entire day each month to go to a place to meet with facilitators, trainers, and like-minded peers — middle management or emerging talent that wants to get into the upper echelons of leadership in organizations. Some people are go-getters and know what they want out of the training. Some people are like her — there because they were championed or told to attend by their bosses, not that Tyrion is her boss. But he has influence — and he is nice, even as she has to work hard not to read too much paternalism and privilege in his heavy-handed meddling. She already knows she’s meek and bad at speaking up — like, he isn’t the first person to make this observation about her.

During lunch, she meets a woman named Rebecca and a man named Vincent. They are colleagues, so they speak to each other with a sense of knowing and an easy coworker-intimacy. Vincent asks Rebecca how things are with the boyfriend.

Rebecca is definitely not this woman’s birth name. She speaks with an accent that Missy places as Ghiscari, and Rebecca says the boyfriend is good right before giving Missandei the backstory. They met while they were in graduate school together, on the West coast. They became friends and no offense to him, but Rebecca didn’t realize he was into women until she got a job offer in King’s Landing and she asked him whether or not she should take it. In response, he asked her if she would be his girlfriend. She was stunned and also a little perturbed that he didn’t answer her question directly — but she agreed to be his girlfriend. They have only been long distance. When he talks about moving to King’s Landing to be with her, she cringes inside and thinks that it’s too much — to be in the same city as one another.

There are certain beats to this story that ring painfully truthful to Missandei — this is why she just blurts out, “Why are you even with this guy? You don’t sound really into him.”

Vincent casts Missandei a secretive smile. And Rebecca either pretends or actually didn’t hear Missandei, because Rebecca doesn’t answer the question. She just keeps on chatting about the museum she and her boyfriend went to, the last time he was in town. She says that she supposes that it’s her turn to go visit him now.

 

 

  
Missy generally has to listen and withhold information as Irri gabs through the movie previews by telling Missy and Yara that the guy still hasn’t called or texted her yet, what the fuck? Irri is looking at Missy expectantly — and it makes Missy slouch in her seat with her arms crossed over her chest. She defensively mutters, “Why are you looking at me? I don’t know him.”

“If it matters so much to you, why don’t you just call him?” Yara whispers. Her interest in this is actually almost non-existent. Her eyes are trained on the glowing screen in front of them and she’s trying to close down this conversation as swiftly as possible.

“I can’t do that!” Irri says. “It will look desperate.”

Yara grunts. Then only says, “Ah, gender roles bullshit.”

 

 

  
Randomly, she ends up talking about Dany’s husband in therapy — like, she ends up talking about him _a lot_ , enough to make her feel weird about it, though she’s been through enough therapy to know that she shouldn’t feel that weird about it. She’s really just using him as an example or as a metaphor.

Olenna asks her how her new thyroid medication is working. Missandei says it’s actually nice — she can detect the uptick in energy and her sleep patterns have evened out. She’s also getting periods on the regular.

She brings up her sex drive before Olenna does — to make a point, maybe to mark her own progress. Her cheeks still manage to flush as she tells Olenna that she can’t really detect much change, in her want of sex, but then, this isn’t something that she can easily and rigorously test. She reminds herself and Olenna that she’s never really had much of a sex drive ever — but then her family of origin stuff is a tad repressive. It was not like how it is these days, with white parents going around telling their daughters that their enjoyment of sex matters. Missy is sometimes still in the habit of being worried that some man is hiding in the back seat of her car in the garage at work, waiting to assault her. She’s still kind of in the habit of waiting for herself to age out of being rapeable.

She says, “Sorry, I am nervously rambling,” as she looks out the window, focusing on a swaying branch with red leaves hanging on in the cold.

Olenna smiles at her. She says, “It’s okay. Keep talking. Sometimes we all just need to get it all out.” Olenna waves her hands in front of her body. “Release it out.”

Missandei grimaces. And then she says, “My best friend is married to this really, really good-looking man. He’s really handsome — and he’s also super nice to me on top of being handsome. I get embarrassed and shy all the time when I’m around him — and I also have a hard time saying his name. I keep referring to him as Dany’s husband — and I’ve known him ever since Dany met him — so it’s been about . . . five years? I’m just so weird about saying his name.”

“Why do you think that is? What is his name?”

“His name is Drogo. And I haven’t thought this through yet, but if I had to guess, I think it’s because not saying his name creates distance between us. Like, we stay at the acquaintances level.”

“Calling him ‘Dany’s husband’ also constantly reinforces your friend’s ownership over him.”

“Oh,” Missandei breathes. “Yes.”

“Why do you think that’s important for you to articulate?”

“I dunno,” Missy mutters, folding her hands and then unfolding them in her lap. She shrugs. And then she blinks rapidly, because she finds herself getting unexpectedly teary. She looks down at her hands in embarrassment, because now she knows she has to be brave and say something truthful.

After a short pause, she raises her hands up to wipe her eyes with her knuckles. And then she says, “I just love her. She’s one of the most important people in my life. I — never want to do something or ever be in a position where I risk our friendship. I don’t want to ever behave inappropriately or be too like, chummy or flirty with her husband.”

“Do you think you really run this risk, Missandei?”

Missy shakes her head. “Oh, no. I know it’s totally irrational. I know I don’t know how to flirt. I know I can’t even make direct eye contact with handsome men.”

“So why do you think you have this anxiety?”

 

 

  
Missandei still calls her mother Mommy sometimes, and her mother still calls her bee sometimes, a diminutive of baby. It sounds private, secretive, and also cuter in their language.

Missandei fiddles around on her phone as her mom finishes fixing dinner, as her dad — in a joyful mood today because his children are visiting — cracks these biting, arrogant jokes wondering out loud how their mother got so lucky to find a man like him.

Moss nearly gets into a petty argument with their dad over the necessity of car seats for babies — their dad doesn't think they’re that important; Moss does. Mars arrives late and straight from work, so he comes into the house in uniform and with his gun. He goes to the stove and lifts a pot lid to look underneath it before he kisses their mother on the cheek. He smiles at Missandei and looks her up and down.

He says to her, “God, put on some pants, slut.”

She sighs because it’s a joke. She sighs as she opens her arms to accept a hug from his massive body. She is wearing black leggings. She is totally wearing pants.

“Could you not call your sister that; what is wrong with you?” their dad asks from the living room, where he is fiddling with the TV remote, trying to get it to change inputs.

 

 

  
As they talk more and more about the ski trip and the cabin rental, she becomes more and more uneasy with the wealth disparity that is being displayed here. She does not want to spend the GDP of a small island country on an eleven-bedroom chalet, for instance. She does not think that splitting it six or seven or eight ways really makes a difference.

“Babe,” Yara says over after dinner drinks, kind of reading her mind. “Don’t worry about it. We gotchoo.” Yara means that she and Dany don’t mind covering Missandei’s share. Because they never care.

Missandei does not like to feel like a charity case though. She makes a solid living. She has a nice apartment with real adult furniture made of real wood — sorta. She saves money in a retirement account. She has shares of mutual funds. She’s not a poor person, but these rich people constantly trick her into thinking that she is poor. She has to remember that she’s not a poor person, because if she dares to forget, then it means she’s losing her grasp on reality.

“I don’t think we need a special all-terrain vehicle to drive up there,” Missandei gently offers. “I don’t think we need a chef to come in and make us dinner. I don’t think we need an in-house spa and sauna. Like, can we just rent a regular cabin that just has beds and some furniture in it?”

“Of course these are not things that we _need,”_ Tyrion says, strategically trying to sound like a peacemaker, but he’s rich like the rest of them and manipulative to boot. He definitely cannot be trusted at all. “These are just nice-to-have things. And don’t worry, Missandei. If you don’t like spas, just don’t go into the spa.”

“Okay, that’s obviously not the point I was trying to make,” she says, giving him the side-eye. “And you’re talking to me like I’m stupid. Why do I feel like we’re at work all of a sudden?”

That makes him chuckle appreciatively.  
  
“Man, I’m with Missandei,” Grey suddenly says, picking up his head a little bit from the back of the couch, where he is sprawled. “I don’t want to rent a castle, either. I don’t think it’s sensible to rent a place that has house staff and an elevator.”

“Oh my God, look at what you started, Missy,” Drogo says, directing his comment just to her. And then to the both of them, he loudly says, “What are you guys planning on _doing?”_ as he suppresses a smile. “Are you gonna go out on the fucking tundra and build a fucking igloo, and then are you gonna live in that fucking igloo together until it collapses on you guys in the middle of the night and _kills you_ through suffocation or hypothermia?”

“Bud,” Grey drawls. “There’s a fertile middle ground between igloo and Cinderella’s ice castle.”

“Like, did you guys not hear what I said before? About a cabin that has beds and furniture in it?” Missandei asks, raising her hand to get more of their attention. “Like, did you guys just silently veto that and just forgot to tell me?”

She can hear Grey’s laugh-snort, and she smiles at herself as her eyes roam the ceiling in Dany and Drogo’s massive house, because it’s cool whenever she makes someone laugh — intentionally.

“Guys,” Dany cuts in. “If it’s a money thing — don’t worry about it. You’re our friends —”

“It is and it isn’t a money thing,” Grey says. “I can afford this. I just don’t want to. Because it’s completely excessive.”

“It’s totally excessive!” Missandei echoes.

“Okay, well, so there is the two of you — against the _rest of us,”_ Yara says. “So you’re completely outvoted. Too bad. We’re going to do the chalet.”

“This is exactly why white people stay in power,” Grey mutters. “It’s because of shit like this.”

This time, it’s Missandei who snort-laughs.

 

 

  
During karaoke night, everyone gets plastered except for her because she doesn’t want to risk an upset stomach that incapacitates her for an entire week. Everyone else is so drunk that they don’t really care or notice or comment on the fact that she just really mines the shit out of Bryan Adams’ discography. Bryan Adams reminds her of her dad and her dad reminds her of karaoke. Bryan Adams also inexplicably reminds her of romance, too.

“Wait — did that sound incestuous?” she asks Dany, her brows furrowed.

Dany is in the midst of flipping through a song book. Dany laughs out loud, though Missy cannot be sure that Dany even accurately heard her.

In the stuffy karaoke room, Missy watches as Drogo channels both of her older brothers and drinks probably his entire body weight in beer. She watches as Dany softens and says something nice to her husband like, in public. In front of other people. Dany tells her husband that he smells good as she sniffs his cheek — and now, Missandei realizes that maybe that was not a compliment at all. Maybe that was sarcastic.

Missandei watches as Yara brushes hair out of her friend’s face and realizes that the two of them are actually more than friends because Yara never really looks at Missandei with such tenderness when she pushes hair off Missandei’s face.

Missandei watches as Irri capably maintains Grey’s attention — they’ve been talking a lot throughout the night, and exclusively with each other — as the flickering disco lights swirl over all of their faces.

Missy has the remote console in her lap. She squints really hard to read the buttons. She is the only one singing. She has sung probably four Bryan Adams songs in a row. She just goes for it, says fuck it, and just waits in anticipation as the first few bars of a Pretenders song drift out of the speakers. She stands up so that she can sing from her diaphragm.

Grey suddenly calls out, “Whoa, what happened to Bryan Adams?”

 

 

  
Over group text with her, Dany, and Yara, with no lead-in whatsoever, Irri announces to them that she’s not going on the ski trip after all. She’s dropping out. The message comes through during lunch time, so immediately in response, Yara sends them a photo of her burrito. And then she asks Irri why Irri is being a fucking flake.

Missy is huddled over a small table holding up a steaming bowl of miso soup, a row of sushi, and gluten-free tamari sauce. She wipes her lips with her napkin as she stares at her phone screen, taking off some of her lipstick with the action.

What follows is a deeply personal, overly detailed, kind of dehumanizing breakdown of why Irri is not going on the ski trip. Dany never chimes into the conversation thread, which makes Missy think that Dany just hasn’t gotten around to checking her messages yet.

Irri tells them that she doesn’t want to go on the ski trip because things between her and Grey are really, really awkward now, and she doesn’t want to bring that energy to their group vacation. She doesn’t want to be trapped in a chalet with him.

At this point, Yara cuts in and pointedly asks what the fuck Grey did to Irri. Yara bluntly asks if Grey date-raped Irri or what?

There are a lot of dot-dot-dots. A lot of typing and probably erasing and probably retyping from Irri. It goes on for almost a minute, long enough for Yara to snap with impatience and write out for Irri to just come out with it already.

This is when Irri writes: _Guys, he has no penis._

Missandei’s entire face immediately tingles in goosebumps and shoots up a million degrees because — what does that even mean?

Yara is already asking the questions. Yara is trying to figure out if this is some sort of joke, if Irri is being an idiot, if Irri is being for real — and how the fuck this even came up as a topic of conversation? Irri is typing rapidly now, telling them that she and Grey went to dinner — and they had a really, really awesome dinner. Like, it was so great, and he was cute and charming, and she thought it was going somewhere — she thought it’d logically go somewhere. So she invited him back to her place. And then they had a really intense and heavy conversation outside of the restaurant, next to her fucking car in the cold. He told her he thinks she is cool, that she is pretty, that he is attracted to her, but he doesn’t have a dick — which pretty much explains why he was playing hard-to-get so hard with her.

Yara is asking why he doesn’t have a dick. She asks if he is trans or what?

Irri responds and says she doesn’t think he is trans. There was apparently an accident when he was younger. She didn’t ask for the details because she didn’t want to know the gruesome details. She was just busy reeling from the information and all of that.

This is the point in which the server checks in on Missandei and slides the receipt on the edge of her table. He says, “Take your time,” with a smile.

She immediately shuts off her phone screen to look up at him. She says, “Thank you.” She realizes that she hasn’t touched much of her food at all, so she quickly shoves a few pieces of sushi into her mouth as she digs in her purse for her wallet. She has a one o’clock meeting she has to get to, so she settles the bill quickly and then starts rushing down the concrete sidewalk in her heels.

 

 

 

 


	5. Missy meets the parents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chap, Grey has a heart to heart with his dad, before it all goes to shit. Missandei gets to play chauffeur and unwitting witness.

 

 

 

 

When Missandei finally checks back into group chat — out of morbid curiosity even though she definitely feels like she is imposing on Grey’s privacy like a real intrusive asshole — she is kind of surprised to see that Yara and Irri ended up having a real epic fight over text while Missandei was in meetings for the rest of the day, with Yara accusing Irri of being a real transphobic basic bitch and Irri generally not agreeing with and being offended by that assessment. Irri crassly wrote she’s not going to fuck a guy with no dick just to prove that she’s not a bigot. Yara angrily wrote that Irri doesn’t even fucking get why she’s so fucking offensive, which is just so typical.

The last words were exchanged at around 3 p.m., and they were words in which the both of them agreed that there was no fucking point in continuing the conversation anymore.

Missy ends up archiving the message thread so that it doesn’t show in her feed anymore.

 

 

  
His dad is backseat-driving as Grey chops up wood for the fireplace. His dad keeps telling him to put his back into it — which is a repetitive joke that Grey is kind of tired of. The firewood is not as much for warmth as it is because his dad loves fire. His dad loves to stare at flickering flames as he tells Grey the reasons why humans love and need life-giving fire, how fire was the boon that propelled their species from simple mammals that only knew how to shit and eat and fuck — to simple mammals who can send fucking probes into outer space.

Bundled up in a sheepskin coat, stuffed in a patio chair with a fleece blanket, his dad says, “Just think of the precision in calculation required to get something out of the fucking atmosphere, son. Just think of the collective brain power and think about the kind of vision it takes for someone to go, ‘You know what? I know there is something more than what is on this fucking planet. Let’s go figure it out.’ Just think of it, Nudho.”

“Yeah,” Grey mutters, as he slams the blade of his ax precisely down the middle of a trunk, splitting it cleanly in half. “It’s nuts, Dad.”

“Am I fucking boring you right now?”

Grey pauses, blinking through the bright sun — as his own sweat stings his eyes. He’s only wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and gloves. His mom already freaked out and told him he was going to catch a cold. His dad swiftly corrected his mom and said that Grey actually doesn’t increase his chances of getting sick by freezing his dumb ass off outside. Viruses and germs cause illness, not low temperatures.

Grey patiently says, “Dad, I can’t talk to you at the same time I’m doing this. So it’s one or the other. Do you want me to have a conversation with you, or do you want me to chop wood?”

His dad chuckles. “Those are my two choices, eh?”

Grey shrugs, wiping his brow.

And then his dad’s shoulders curve inward a little bit as he shifts in his chair. His dad stares at him, assessing him — pensively. His dad appears to work over what he wants to say in his head before he clears his throat with a cough, before saying, “Son, no bitch is worth you feeling down on yourself. Forget that bitch.”

Grey makes a short sound like, “Huh,” as he subtly rocks back on his heels, pressing the ax into the cold ground. “What makes you think there’s a woman?”

“You were always sneaking out of the house at odd hours, like you are a teenager again. You were being secretive.”

Grey grins. “That’s because you’re intrusive!”

“Shut the fuck up,” his dad retorts, before cracking a smile. “So there isn’t a bitch?”

“I don’t think you should be casually calling women bitches, Dad.”

“You sound like your mom. It was a joke, son. I don’t know this hypothetical woman. I don’t know if she’s actually a bitch or not. I was editorializing.”

Grey licks his dry, chapped lips. The cold is settling into his skin and his bones now, because he has stopped moving. He shivers a little bit as he sways on his feet.

Grey shrugs. He gestures to the front of his pants. He says, “Yeah, there was a woman who was interested in me until I told her about this fucking mess. And then — she wasn’t interested anymore.”

“Fuck that bitch,” his dad says.

“You really can’t blame her, Dad.”

“Yes I can,” his dad says. “Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.”

“What if you learned that mom had a massive dick on the second date?” Grey presses. “How would that go over? You’d fucking keep dating her and you’d marry her and would have kids with her and all of that?”

His dad hesitates, for just a moment. In that moment, Grey picks up the ax again and swirls his head around to crack his neck. Then his dad says, “I would keep seeing her.”

“Bullshit,” Grey says, bending down to position another stump, nudging it with his foot a little bit.

“How would she have kids?”

“Huh?” Grey says, placing the blade of his ax at the center of the trunk.

“How would she have kids? Does your mom have ovaries and a uterus, too? On top of a pecker and balls? Is she a hermaphrodite?”

“I think the better term is intersex, Dad —”

“Oh shit, I forgot you went to medical school, too,” his dad says sarcastically, throwing his hand out. “Oh wait, you didn’t. You gave up the chance of having a noble career in order to help perverts have easy access to porn. I’m saying, individuals with the chromosomal constitution and reproductive organs of a female but the external genitalia of males tend to not have complete reproductive organs. It’s actually rare for these individuals to be able to make babies, carry them, and give birth. Your hermaphrodite mom statistically would never have been able to make _you_ or your brother. You just imagined yourself out of existence, son.”

“Dad, this is a fucking hypothetical!” Grey says. “And this is beside the main point.”

“Is it though? Because I’m now worried that you don’t understand how human biology works. You’re supposed to be my smartest kid —”

“You’re distracting me!” Grey shouts, unsteadily raising the ax above his head.

“Fuck, you are going to do this facing me?” his dad asks in a sudden panic.

“I won’t hit you,” Grey says, through clenched teeth.

“You don’t know that.”

Grey remembers this one time when he came home from a date completely dejected. He was fifteen and that was a fun age, because girls were still scared of sex at that age so there was no pressure there from him. That stuff only came later.

Still, even with the innocence and lightness of that age, he still came home just really upset and down on himself. He was underdeveloped and full of acne at the time — baby-faced with a cracking voice.

His dad asked him what the fuck was up with the bad mood. He told his dad that his date was just so fucking out of his league. She was beautiful and got good grades and was a cheerleader. She was just too good for him.

He remembers that, holy shit, his dad lost his mind. Grey didn’t expect it at all, but his dad just started yelling at him instead of comforting him. His dad called him the dumbest shit and to never feel that way and to never voice that kind of shit ever again — because it’s just dumb to walk around giving women extra reasons not to want to screw him. His dad told him to just let women figure that part out on their own.

Grey understands it was a rant in defense of what his dad thinks he deserves. He understands it was love.

He realizes that he doesn’t know what it feels like to stare in the face of the extinction of life, of education, of possibilities, and of a future — to witness that kind of devastation and loss. Grey never had to contend with the murder of parents and family. He never had to work in menial jobs for years before joining the military, before collecting enough money and assets together to start medical school all the fuck over again with young kids running around, kids who needed to be clothed and fed. He doesn't know what sacrifice really means and how it really feels and what it actually means.

He knows that he doesn’t actually have any real problems.

Grey pulls the ax even farther back, rocking on his heels and digging his feet into the ground before he clenches the muscles in his stomach, arms, back, and legs and slams the ax down dead center in the chunk of wood. It cuts cleanly in half and the way the two pieces fall over is pretty anticlimactic-looking.

At that — his dad starts chuckling — this low and raspy rumble of affection and fondness.

Grey looks at his dad. He says, “I get why you’re trying to distract me. But it’s okay. It doesn’t hurt me anymore,” Grey says. “And I know that nobody owes me anything. I know no one owes me her presence.”

His dad’s eyes on him are steady — like his dad is seeing what he has made. Grey is tempted to cut eye contact and to look away. But before he can do that, his dad urgently tells him, “I love the shit out of you. You know that right?”

Grey says, “I know.”

 

 

  
Grey doesn’t do enough winter sports to own a pair of skis or a snowboard or boots or even winter gear or anything like that. Drogo — who has completely lost track of himself and where he comes from — who is bougie as fuck now — suggests to Grey that Grey just buy new shit. Might as well because they’re gonna be fucking snowboarding a lot together.

Grey tells Drogo that Drogo doesn’t even know if Grey will like it. Drogo responds by confidently calling Grey a motherfucker and also by confidently saying that Grey will like it. Grey will actually love it. Drogo says that he knows Grey like Drogo knows himself.

Grey is like, oh, okay, that is really overstated. And Drogo doesn’t know fucking jack. Case in point is that entire thing with Irri.

Drogo is blase and unconcerned in his response. He tells Grey whatever. Irri is just whatever.

Sensing that he is getting nowhere fast, Grey then sighs and tells Drogo that he’ll figure something out. He gotta go.

Grey ends up calling his brother, because his brother is an athlete and has probably done ninety-nine percent of every sport there is out there.

His brother is parked somewhere sunny and beachy, in the Summer Isles. Azzie picks up the phone on the second ring, and immediately says, “What the heck, FaceTime me, dumbass.” And then he hangs up on Grey.

For a moment, Grey just _hates_ everyone in his life. Because they just make him work so fucking hard all the time. Like, he doesn’t understand why his brother won’t just videochat _him_ back if it’s so fucking important to him. Nevertheless, Grey goes through the trouble of like, finding their mom to ask her if he can borrow her iPad, because he actually doesn’t own a fucking device that can FaceTime.

His mom’s iPad rings Azzie — and Azzie’s face pops up on the screen and is like, “Mom?” in confusion.

“No, fucker,” Grey says, already agitated. “It’s me. I don’t have FaceTime.”

Azzie excitedly says, “Baby bro! It’s so good to see your face, man! How are you, man?” The sun is shining bright behind him. The sky is blue and cloudless. Azzie is also shirtless, and his hair has grown out some.

“Where is your snowboard and winter gear?” Grey says, immediately cutting to the chase. And then he says, “I am fine.”

 

 

  
Dany’s husband — Drogo — texts Missandei the night before the ski trip. She’s shocked to hear from him because they never text. They usually talk through Dany. There was one time that Missandei needed to be picked up from the airport at three in the morning and Dany volunteered Drogo to do it. Even then, all of the logistical details was communicated through Dany.

She _does_ have Drogo’s number saved in her phone. Dany gave it to her in case of emergency. Missy learned that he also had her number saved in his phone when they were all at a bar and he was cracking up and talking about a gif that was a popular meme — about cheese or something or other. She was utterly blank and not understanding because she’s not cool and isn’t up to date on trends. He ended up sending her the gif over text message so that she can get with it.

The night before the ski trip, as she’s packing clothes into her suitcase on her bed — his text comes through. He’s asking her if she minds picking Grey up on her way to their house. He tells her he was gonna do it himself, but he and Dany are currently not on top of their shit and they will not be ready in time if he needs to make the extra trip to Grey’s.

Because Missandei never texts with Drogo ever, she works hard to be casual and not fucking weird about it. She says it’s no problem at all. She can totally pick up Grey.

And then — spastically — she realizes she knows _nothing._ She doesn’t know where Grey lives. She doesn’t know what time she’s supposed to pick him up. She doesn’t know how in the world to contact him, or if she’s even supposed to contact him or if she’s just like, his Lyft driver? Like, is Drogo the new Dany in this dynamic? Is she meant to talk to Grey through Drogo now? She also doesn’t know if Grey knows that she’s going to pick him up — like has this whole thing been fully coordinated yet? Are these logistics set in stone or are they just spitballing and brainstorming here?

She’s got half of this stuff typed out when her phone starts ringing and buzzing in her hand. She looks at the screen just dumbfounded even though this is all predictable and sensical. She answers the call with uncertainty, even as she knows it’s him. She says, “Hello? Drogo? Is that you?”

He immediately laughs loudly into her ear.

 

 

  
He is agitated and running behind because his dad fucking commandeered his entire early morning by yelling at him and chewing him out for not having any foresight. His dad figures out that he will run out of his medications while he is away — and Grey doesn’t think it’s a big deal to go a few days without his meds, but his dad thinks it’s a _huge_ fucking deal. Which is dumb because his dad is being irrational and wouldn’t get like this if he was dealing with one of his patients.

His dad ends up making him feel massively guilty because his dad fucking grumpily calls in a refill to a 24-hour pharmacy while insulting Grey under his breath. One of Grey’s meds is a controlled substance, so the pharmacist gives his dad some grief about it, but his dad tells the pharmacist to relax, it’s a schedule four drug. As his dad gets put on hold, his dad glares at Grey and says, “I really fucking hope we don’t end up having to call your doctor and waking him or her the fuck up so that you can get your drugs before your trip, dipshit.”

Grey has to keep his mouth shut. Otherwise his fist might swing out and cram itself into his dad’s fucking face.

The pharmacist ends up accepting his dad’s script — probably because the pharmacist digs deep into Grey’s profile in the pharmacy database and sees that his dad has prescribed him meds in the past before. His dad has even prescribed him controlled substances in the past before — but it’s been years.

Grey rarely needs the Xanax. He hasn’t taken it in fucking months. He didn’t take it when his former CEO experienced a data breach while traveling overseas and Grey got pulled out of bed and had to camp out at the center for a few days. He didn’t take a Xanax when he got his ass reamed when his CEO came back and asked what the fuck happened and how it happened.

If he didn’t need a Xanax for that instance, he doesn’t think he’ll need a Xanax in order to hang out in a fucking overpriced log cabin for a few days with his richass white friends . . . and Drogo.

He cannot say any of this shit to his dad right now though. Because his dad is fucking being unreasonable and overbearing.

“Okay, your scripts are getting processed right now, idiot,” his dad snarls when he finally gets off the phone. “So go get them! Run off and go get them!”

Grey looks at his mom — whose lips are in a tight line. She is a little unreadable right now. He fucking loves how much this makes him feel sixteen again. He fucking loves how much he ironically could use a fucking Xanax right now. He asks, “Can I borrow your car, Mom? I’ll be back before you need to get to work.”

“And when the fuck are you going to buy a car, Grey!” his dad snaps. “You can’t constantly be taking your mom’s car all the time!”

His mom sighs and hands him her keys. She says, “No problem, Grey.”

 

 

  
He actually forgot that Missandei is picking him up. He still was operating as if Drogo is picking him up — and Drogo has watched Grey's dad yell at Grey so many times before that Drogo isn’t even fazed by it anymore.

So when Grey gets back to the house with his meds and realizes, in fucking horror, that it’s actually Missandei who is picking him up — that she had actually arrived to retrieve him in the time that he was gone — well, he wants to fucking punch himself in the face because he’s just so fucking cool. He is a thirty-year-old adult man who still lives with his mommy and daddy. He is an adult man who still gets told how to fucking wipe his ass by his father. Because he is apparently just a fucking moron.

As he walks into the house, he sees that she is sitting in his kitchen with a cup of coffee or tea. She is talking to his parents. He is kind of shocked that his dad is not randomly yelling at her, too.

Grey stiffly walks into the kitchen with the paper bag of his medications crumpled in his fist. To her, his voice is low as he says, “Hey, sorry. Let me just grab my shit and throw it in your car real quick. Then we can go.”

“Charming,” his dad says sarcastically. “How about you say thank you to her for waking up early and prepared and for carting your car-less ass to Drogo’s house?”

So Grey actually doesn’t do that. He doesn’t thank her. He just thinks that this is really a great moment with his family that she gets to be a part of — as he silently stares at his dad for a beat before he deliberately turns around and walks out of the kitchen and down the hall to his bedroom. There, he quickly grabs the handles of his brother’s gear and his bags and drags all of it to the front door.

In the foyer, he hears his mom and dad being super duper nice to Missandei like the psychopaths that they are, asking her about what she does for a living, where she lives, where she grew up, and all of that. His dad starts telling a really convoluted story about a Naathi friend that he once had a million years ago. It’s a story that could probably take up an entire fucking hour, so Grey decides to interrupt. He says to her, “Okay, ready?”

“Sure,” she says shyly. She cannot even look him in the face. Obviously because this shit is just so fucking tense and weird.

“It was so nice meeting you, Missandei,” his mom says earnestly, as Missandei stands up from the table.

In Summer Tongue — and his dad is switching on purpose so that they can have a private conversation right out in the open — his dad asks him if he had problems getting his drugs. Grey stops himself from glaring. He just succinctly responds with a yes. He got his meds.

His dad then decides to push it and lecture him a little bit. His dad says that, obviously no, he knows that Grey is not going to go off and fucking kill himself if he doesn’t take his meds for a few days, but titration can be a fucking kick in the ass, and it takes minimal effort to avoid brain fog. That is the logic here. And what if he has a fucking anxiety attack in the middle of a snowdrift. What the fuck then?

Grey tells his dad that he gets it. He understands all of it. He gets the logic and where his dad is coming from. Happy?

His dad says that obviously Grey doesn’t get it, because he just looks so fucking pissed right now — and he’s being really rude to the girl.

This is when his mom chimes in and says that it’s actually rude that the two of them are carrying on like this in front of the girl. His mom casts glances to Missandei, who attentively is staring at them. His mom smiles at Missandei, who smiles back.

His dad then asks if this is _the_ girl. Is this the horrible bitch?

His mom scoffs, crosses her arms, and admonishes his dad.

His dad clarifies that he didn’t call the girl a bitch. He’s asking if this girl is _the_ bitch. The two things are different things.

And this is when Missandei nervously laughs, getting their individual attentions. She’s frowning and wringing her own hands and she chimes in and says, “I’m sorry, I was trying to be polite because I didn’t realize this would go on so long. But now it’s just really awkward. I think you guys should know that I understand what you are saying. I speak Summer Tongue.”

Grey blurts out, “What the fuck!” in surprise, because he didn’t know this about her.

Grey’s dad also says, “What!” in surprise. And then he lights up like a supernova — like an exploding sun — and he says, “Sweetheart, you speak Summer Tongue!”

 

 

 

 

 


	6. Grey is good at sports

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ski vacation time! Missandei is still really bad at flirting. And driving in the snow. Grey is great at snowboarding and knowing his physical limits!

 

 

 

Grey’s mom randomly shoves a bunch of crinkly foil packets into Grey’s hands, and he freaks out and nearly drops the entire bundle before he realizes that they are actually individual packages of salted and roasted almonds — not condoms, which is what his mind initially thought they looked like.

In response to his nervous fumbling, his dad says, “Christ, would you unclench your ass sphincter just a _little bit_ , son? You’re gonna make yourself constipated.” And then his dad says, “Don’t look at me like that. Your friend can understand all the languages I speak.”

His mom fucking stuffs two bananas into each of his coat pockets. She tells him to “share,” which is awesome because now he sounds selfish, like he wouldn’t give Missandei the one other banana he has in his possession without his mommy telling him to.

Grey’s dad’s hand is heavy and warm on Missandei’s shoulder, as he tells her it was so great to meet her and that he hopes to see her again soon. He’d love to sit down with her and talk to her more about Naath and also about how she acquired the language skills that she has.

 

 

  
She mis-anticipates the energy in the car when she finally climbs into it. She assumes that he’s going to be tense and pensive and quiet and that it’s going to be awkward. But he’s shoving all of the nuts his mom gave him into his backpack at his feet, and he’s pulling out the two bananas his mom gave him and drops them in her cup holders as she starts the engine. She makes eye contact with his parents — who seem really, really nice and sweet, actually. She smiles at them as they wave goodbye to her. She waves back, the motion of it catching Grey’s eye.

When he looks up, he also sees them — he sees his mom holding up her phone to take a picture of him and Missandei — and he bursts out laughing. He braces his forearm against her dashboard and he forms his hand into a fist as he buries his laughter into his sleeve. He’s laughing because his folks just make him seem so fucking cool.

 

 

  
About ten minutes into the drive, she can pretty much feel every molecule in her sweaty body. She’s bundled up in many, many layers — and the car’s heater is running furiously on high. She’s too self-conscious to lower the heat because she remembers what he said about one minute into the drive. He said, “Whoa!” and observed that she must run a little cold, an assessment she agreed with in a mental panic even though it’s not true — because he was staring right at her when he said it. He then said, “It’s cozy in here,” and stripped off his jacket before tossing it in the backseat. Because of that interaction — she is just stuck sweating her ass off, because lowering the heater and confessing that she is _dying_ would reveal that she is weirdly comfortable with casual lying?

“Wanna banana?” he suddenly asks, after a solid stretch of silence. He’s holding up a banana, so that she can see it in her peripheral vision. He’s saying, “I can peel it for you?”

“No, I’m good,” she says. She’s too nervous to eat. And while it’s highly unlikely that the banana was dipped in a vat of flour or smeared over crusty bread, she generally likes to give her full attention to food to ensure she does not get sick, even if the food seems pretty safe.

“Oh, okay,” he says with a slight nod. And then he rips off the top of the banana, before quickly pulling down sections of the peel so it looks like the banana is wearing a skirt. She silently kind of watches him eat as she also watches the road ahead of them. She sees that he doesn’t bite right into the banana. He likes to break off small pieces that he pops into his mouth.

He totally catches her watching him. He totally catches her eye — and he grins with his cheeks full. He grins so openly and so transparently and she is fucking wondering if he _knows_ that she _knows_ that he does not have a penis. Maybe he does and this is his acknowledgement of that? What the fuck, no that doesn’t make sense. That’s not what is happening here!

She burns up even more in her hellish fleece and underneath her hair, which feels like a fucking helmet right now. She automatically breaks eye contact as he says, “Are you sure you don’t want some? Do you want a small piece?”

She shakes her head — the motion feels tight and not casual at all. She forces cheer into her voice as she says, “No, I’m good!”

“Alright,” he says. “Well, the other banana totally has your name on it. You know, ‘cause my mom told me I had to share. So, whenever you want it — it’s right here.” He’s patting the console in between them.

 

 

Grey is kind of convinced that Missandei either thinks he’s a freak because his family scared the shit out of her — or Missandei thinks he’s a freak because her friend Irri told her that he has no penis. He is pretty confident that all roads lead back to Missandei thinking he’s a freak. He is pretty good at picking up vibes and energy — and not the woo-woo stuff that his dad hates because it’s not based on science. Grey actually means he’s good at picking up anxiety and the multitude of nonverbal cues associated with anxiety.

Missandei is just buzzing right now. She is just strung up _tight._ And it’s clearly because of him. He’s been trying to help her calm down by showing her his normalcy — also with a bunch of non-verbal cues. He’s been laying down gentle jokes, primate-y submissive smiles, and loose body movement — but it’s just not working.

Well, he tried his best. And his best is all he can do.

He reaches out to touch her volume dial. He asks her permission. He says, “Do you mind if I turn it up?”

She looks bewildered — jumpy. It takes her a weirdly long amount of time to answer. Her answer is, “Sure.”

He smiles at her again — his smiles are always genuine. He doesn’t know how to fake it. He’s smiling because he has a talent for finding humor even in the most morose of moments. He’s smiling because this whole thing is just wild.  
  
He knows that many women have been wrong about him. He knows that he’s not broken. He knows that he is not lacking. He knows that he’s not a freak. He knows that he’s not weird. He knows that he is not dysfunctional. He knows he is steady, even, and he is absolutely secure in who he is. He feels proud of this because it was such a fight to achieve this — it was something he had to really earn the shit out of. He is afraid of very few things now. He’s not afraid of any person. He knows that it is everyone else who has the problem, not him.

He cranks up the volume. He thinks it will be a relief for her if it’s too loud for them to talk. He can see her watching him out of the corner of her eye. He doesn’t care that much about what she must think of him. He just moves his head to the syncopated beat. He just drums his hand against his knee. He just settles into the passenger seat and takes up some relaxed space. He thinks it’s funny that she’s playing hip hop because he previously thought she was really into like, white guy crooners from three decades ago. This is new information about her, maybe. He loudly says, “This has a nice raw bounce sound, right?”

She says, “Huh?” and he cannot tell if it’s because she actually can’t hear him or if she just doesn’t know bounce.

 

 

  
Drogo doesn’t expect the weird as shit energy that ultimately flows from Missandei’s SUV. He was actually very optimistic when he sees her car come up his driveway. Her windows rattle with heavy bass as she drives up — it makes Drogo smile in a huge way and shimmy his shoulders a little bit because it sounds like a motherfucking party is happening.

But then Missy kills the ignition — the music gets swallowed up into silence — she shyly and awkwardly slinks out of the driver’s side — and Grey throws open the door of the passenger side and then hops out.

Missandei apologizes right away. She says, “So sorry we’re late!”

“No big,” Yara drawls. They are only fifteen minutes late.

Missandei still looks a little distraught. Drogo is wondering what the fuck even happened already.

“It’s actually my fault, guys,” Grey says, plucking his jacket from the backseat of Missandei’s car. He’s shrugging into it. “I should be the one to apologize. I made us late because my dad took some time taking his _massive_ dick out — before _slapping_ me in the face with it. I just forgot how long it takes to be slapped in the face by a dick. My bad.”

Drogo straightens his back. He smears his lips together before his mouth curves into a wide grin. How chivalrous.

Drogo shakes his head in a slow, molasses-y kind of disbelief — the kind of disbelief that is appreciative and a little bit infatuated. He smiles at his best friend, that fucking little bitch. Grey’s still too far away from him to reach out to physically grab. So Drogo shouts out. He says, “Yo, you remember Braavos?”

Grey laughs loudly. He says, “Oh my God, so much PTSD, so much PTSD!”

“What do you mean it just fucking happened?” Drogo growls, mimicking Grey’s dad, trying to evoke an old memory. He’s walking up to Grey.

Grey picks up on it right away. He says, “Dad, we walked out, and they just had knives.”

“What were you doing just strolling out into broad daylight with your eyes fucking closed like you think you’re fucking Ray Charles!”

“Dad, my eyes were actually opened. I mean, I saw them before they took their knives out. And Ray Charles couldn’t see because he was blind, Dad. Not because he just had his eyes closed for like, sixty years.”

Drogo throws his arms around Grey. He feels the air leave Grey’s lungs. He feels and hears Grey’s soft gasp because Drogo is squeezing so tight. He easily lifts Grey up, pulling the guy off his feet. This guy is the very fucking best. This guy is actually the personification of sunshine.

“You guys literally just saw each other yesterday,” Dany breaks in, her voice unimpressed and monotone.

 

 

  
They get to the cabin mostly without incident. Missandei has next to zero snow-driving experience, which they did not know. She becomes really anxious and nervous when the small flurries became fat flakes that obscure her visual of the road. Each slippery swerve in the windy road stresses her out. Dany’s lead foot and steady ascent up the pass also stresses her out, because Missy is torn between keeping up and not just fucking killing half of them with her ineptitude.

Drogo is hugging a small cooler in his lap that _used to be_ filled with six beers. He gave three to Jaime, Tyrion’s brother who took up Irri’s spot on this trip. Grey didn’t want any beers, which turned out to be a godsend because after Missandei’s millionth muffled, worried groan, Drogo just tells her, “Hey, Missandei — would you wanna take a break from driving, you champ, and would you wanna give Grey a chance behind the wheel of your car?”

Drogo expects her to try and save face and say that she can make it the rest of the way. He expects some nervous chatter or questions from her because that’s her MO. He expects her to ask Grey what his snow driving qualifications are. But actually — she seems immensely relieved at Drogo’s suggestion and says, “Okay. That would be awesome.”

She pulls over onto the side and puts her hazards on. He tells her to be very careful getting out of the car, because it’s slippery and cold and also — she could get sideswiped by another vehicle that has lost control. She shoots him this panicked glance over her shoulder as he gives her an encouraging smile.

Then Drogo pats Grey on the butt as Grey obediently climbs out of the the back and out onto the road. There’s a whoosh of cold air next to him as Missandei climbs into the seat that Grey just vacated.

Drogo offers her a sip out of his half-finished beer can — a celebratory sip. Her eyes are wide and her body is still very tense. She waves off the beer. She says, “No thanks. It has gluten in it.”

As the car starts moving again, he says, “Oh, right. I forgot.”

 

 

  
They actually rented a cabin, not a castle. Good judgement finally won the day, and when they arrive at the five bedroom house — full of beds and furniture like Missandei wanted — also a sauna and spa and pre-prepped food left by staff members — Drogo doesn’t even need to look at the place. There is something still very basic in his constitution. He is still a person that only needs a fire and a floor to sleep on — and he’s happy. He walks into the nearest bathroom to pee out the three cans of beer, and then he pours himself a neat glass of bourbon.

His wife asks him, “You’re going to get drunk before you slide down the side of a mountain?”

He looks at her face — she is barely smiling — so he knows she’s just fucking around. He has no quip — he feels a little carsick from the long drive. He just downs the rest of his drink. And then he gestures to Grey, who is pulling _off_ a sweater. Grey runs fairly hot when he starts physical activity. Grey can run in short sleeves in the dead of winter.

To Grey, he says, “Ready to go?” as he tilts his head out the massive windows — at the sunny diamond-like sheet of icy blue.

Grey says, “Yeah.”

Jaime says, “Already? We just got here.”

 

 

  
Both Jaime and Grey have never snowboarded before. They were previously only skiers. Grey has to switch over because his brother snowboards, and Grey is using his brother’s stuff. Jaime has to switch over because he lost his hand, so he cannot hold onto poles the way he used to anymore.

Grey falls back down the first time he tries to stand up. And then after that — he is just excellent. He is naturally better at it than Jaime, though Jaime picks it up really fast, too. Tyrion thinks it is disgusting — watching people who are athletic figure out how to physically do shit that makes him nauseous just thinking about it.

After the first few initial runs — easy slopes — Tyrion can sense that the group is about to segregate and splinter apart, based on skill level. He sees Drogo exchange a look with Grey — and Tyrion knows that they are going to go off to do increasingly terrifying shit together.

Tyrion lightly says, “Yeah, so I could use a drink and some warmth.” He looks at Missandei. “How about you?”

 

 

  
A thing about him is that more he beats the shit out of his body — the quieter his brain is — the less he thinks about things. This is one reason why he likes physical activity. The other reason is just obvious and typical. He likes getting good at things. He likes measuring incremental improvement. It is addicting.

He also likes to berate himself into getting better — something that he gets from his father, to be sure. He grew up actually watching his older brother just be completely so much better than him in all sports — watching his dad attend as many of Azzie’s matches and games as he could when he wasn’t working. It was only later that Grey realized that their dad worked so hard to get to Azzie’s games because he was trying to connect better with Azzie. Azzie was not cerebral like Grey. Azzie didn’t have dedicated bedtime stories or science projects or reading time together like Grey and their dad did.

Because it took so long for Grey to realize the impetus behind his dad’s presence at Azzie's games and his dad’s comparative absence at Grey’s games — Grey probably wasted a number of years just being bitter and being insecure about his athletic ability. His coaches always encouraged him because he was medalling and beating his peers, but he wasn’t breaking any of his brother’s records.

There was a short moment in time when he assigned athletic ability to masculinity. He might’ve felt that Azzie was faster, strong, and better than he was because Azzie didn’t get his dick slammed in a door. Grey might’ve just needed a reason — any reason — to attribute as the cause of why he felt emptiness and pointlessness inside of himself.

They snowboard until it’s too dark — until it is unsafe. They only stop because Drogo tells him that they have to stop. And Grey only realizes just how fucking exhausted he is — when the warm heat of the cabin hits him in the face as he crosses the threshold. His legs almost give up and he almost collapses right there on the floor as everyone smiles at him.

“Dude!” Yara says to him. She’s in the middle of washing greens for a salad. “You are so _good!_ How are you so good, just _naturally?”_

Behind him, Drogo is patting his back.

 

 

 

 


	7. Missy is body conscious

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei is inhibited. Jaime gives some backstory on his hand. Yara falls in love — just a little bit. Grey plays nice and shares.

 

 

  
Grey feels bad holding up dinner with his lateness. Drogo completely does not give a shit. While Grey is tempted to jump into the food preparation and try to hopelessly make up for his self-indulgent absence in the labor, Drogo blithely pulls off his sweat-soaked shirt in front of them, balls it in his hands, and announces that he’s going to take a shower before dinner. He shows them he’s a man of his word by grabbing a cold beer from the fridge and opening it with a hissing crack, as he retreats down the hallway.

“Is he going to drink that in the shower?” Obara asks mildly, staring at the spot that Drogo just vacated.

“What was the point of that strip tease?” Tyrion wonders out loud. “Nearly all the women here are either gay-ish or married to him. None of the men here are gay enough for him — except maybe Grey. Was that for Grey’s or Missandei's benefit?”

Missandei, who is mightily embarrassed already, makes a distressed sound.

“I still kinda like looking,” Obara offers. “God, he must do incredibly efficient workouts.”

“Yeah, I kinda like looking, too,” Tyrion admits with a rakish smile. “Good-looking people are a trip.”

Next to Grey, Yara randomly touches runs a fingertip down his shoulder, down his bicep. He is in the middle of washing his hands at the kitchen sink. He is eyeing a cutting board with bits of dice onions stuck to it. He is surveying the spills on the counter and the soiled mixing bowls. He figures that he can definitely clean up.

He hears Yara laughing. He turns to her and sees her grinning at him. She says, “Are you gonna take your shirt off for us too?” And before he can even shoot her a response, she says, “It’s okay for you to shower, too, you know?

 

 

  
Before dinner starts, Missy’s trying to keep herself busy so that she doesn’t have to stand around looking like an awkward dork among some of her closest buddies. She’s putting ice in glasses as she sees Drogo pad back into the kitchen with his wet hair gathered up on top of his head in messy, elastic-tied bundle. She knows no other person who looks and exists like he does. She watches as he tosses his empty beer can into a paper bag full of other cans. She wonders how he even knows that _that_ is their recycling bag. She watches as he looks at the food on the table, says, “Oh, awesome!” Then she watches as he walks over to Grey — who showered in a break-neck three minutes — and Drogo takes Grey’s hand and drops two white tablets into it.

For a freak moment, Missy wonders if it’s a party drug. Is it like, E? Is it like, Molly?

Grey says, “Oh shit,” looking down at the pills, and then without even asking what Drogo just gave him, he knocks both of them back and swallows them down with a rough gulp of beer. Grey says, “Thanks, man.”

She watches as Drogo chuckles and warmly presses the flat of his hand against Grey’s chest, over his sternum. She hears Drogo say, “I’m telling you. I know you like I know _myself._ How did I know you’d fucking _love_ snowboarding? How did I even know you’re in pain right now?”

 

 

  
After Drogo mentions it, some subtle but very tell-tale signs exhibit themselves. She notices Grey constantly fidgeting, swirling his neck, pulling his shoulders back, straightening in his seat, taking deep breaths. He must be sore from snowboarding. Or maybe he experiences chronic pain and that’s why his dad was just on his butt so hard about his medications when she arrived to pick him up?

Unlike Drogo, she does not know this person well at all.

 

 

  
Missandei picks at her food carefully because even though they all know she can’t eat gluten or dairy, the prep looked too lackadaisical to her. She eats raw veggies and kind of avoids the rice because she thinks she remembers seeing Obara cut up slices of bread before reaching out to stir the rice. Missy was too self-conscious to ask anybody to be more careful or more vigilant in the food prep. She was too shy to speak up — and Dany wasn’t paying attention to everything that was going on.

Because she’s picking at her food a bit, Tyrion’s brother — who she met for the first time today — says to her, “Are you not hungry?”

After a day burning so many calories, she is actually kind of starving. She tries to smile at him, and she shakes her head in answer.

He looks kind of amused. He says, “Are you on a diet or something? You really don’t need to be.”

She knows it’s designed to be a compliment. She knows he’s trying to flatter her. But like much of what Tyrion says with the best of intentions — it actually sounds patronizing. It sounds like he’s full of wrong assumptions about her.

And she’s being stupid. He can’t read her mind. She didn’t express enough. She is just fucking terrible at talking to people for some reason. She has been repeatedly told by other people that she has no reason to be so shy because she is intelligent and she is beautiful.

If she can pinpoint the moment her fear of strangers really bloomed, she might refer to an instance when her mom got lost driving somewhere. Missandei cannot remember the destination anymore because she was very young at the time. But her mom spotted a man walking on the sidewalk and in a span of a couple seconds, her mom decides to ask the man for directions — or her mom decides that Missandei will ask the man for directions. She was like, six years old, but fluent in three languages at the time. Her mom could not speak the Common Tongue very well — her mom is still self-conscious about her language abilities and accent in the Common Tongue.

Missandei hated talking to strangers. She hated the responsibility of translating for her mom constantly. She hated all of the moments her mom forced her to be confrontational because her mom is a confrontational person. She hated explaining to cashiers that her mom is pissed because she doesn’t think the store coupon should be expired. She hated being shoved at waiters and made to ask them why it was talking so long to get their food.

The moment she had to ask one particular guy for directions was killer, because that was probably the first time she learned a racial slur. He was really not happy that they stopped to talk to him — he was randomly having a shitty day probably. He snapped at her. She recoiled. She started crying even though she didn’t even know what it meant. And then her mom got pissed and started interrogating her and asking her what in the holy hell she had said that made the man so mad at them. Missandei's inability to explain really just made things worse. She was scared it was stupid and inconsequential, that her mom would get even angrier upon hearing more about Missandei’s ongoing and frustrating fragileness — physical weakness coupled with mental and emotional weakness to boot.

To Jaime, Missandei says, “I was just thinking that if I’m thin enough, maybe someone will finally love me.”

It’s a joke — it’s like one of those incisively truthful and uncomfortable jokes that Tyrion likes to crack — about his height and his body.

Except when Tyrion cracks his jokes, the room crackles in laughter. When she attempts this sort of joke, she gets long, protracted silence — like what is happening right now.

Jaime says, “Wait, are you serious?” all concerned.

“No!” she says, just incredulously. “It was a joke!” This is the loudest she’s been all day.

“Ha!” Drogo says — really forcefully. “Good one, Missandei!”

 

 

  
Yara is watching Jaime eat with his prosthetic hand. He is surprisingly smooth and not that awkward with it because she does not think she’d fare nearly as well if she lost a hand. She doesn’t see the point in beating around the bush, so she bluntly directs her question to him and asks, “How did you lose your hand?”

He grimaces, his handsome face pulling into tension. “Car accident,” he says, speaking without embellishment, which might be a first in the entire day. “I was drunk driving.” He pauses. “No one else was hurt, but yes, I know I’m a shit person.”

“People ask him this question a lot,” Tyrion offers. “Especially little kids.” Then Tyrion grins. “He gives the same answer every time.”

“Little kids are terrible,” Jaime says gravely.

 

 

  
After dinner, there is talk of slipping into the hot tub to let jets and heat beat up some of the lactic acid accumulating in their muscles. Grey expresses to Yara that he doesn’t really feel like hot-tubbing with them. He tells her he’s gonna go have some alone time in the home gym instead. When Yara drops her jaw in shock — that he is going off to do _more physical activity_ on top of the hours of grueling physical activity he has already done, he tells her — and probably everyone else by proxy — that his brain is kind of on overload right now. He needs to decompress with some quiet — not that he doesn’t like all of them. He just wants to be alone for the rest of the night.

He makes a call on the spot — he remembers that she’s gone out of her way to be nice to him and to make him always feel included — so he pays her back with some honesty. He tells her that he watched them just kindly interrogate Jaime about his hand over dinner — asking Jaime about all of the details — and watching that honestly was just really stressful. He tells her he doesn’t feel like taking off any of his clothes and lounging around with them right now. Maybe later, but not right now. He stares at her face patiently. And he is able to clearly see as context and this understanding come over her face.

She clenches her fist. She says, “Irri’s a fucking moron.”

It makes him laugh tiredly. He encases his entire chin in his hand as he says, “No, it’s fine.”

“No, it’s not,” she says.

 

 

  
It is freezing cold outside — of course — so Missandei starts shivering the moment she steps out onto the deck. Drogo is smiling at her and holding up a bottle of wine and an empty glass. She doesn’t get what he’s getting at until he says, “It’s organic!” and then she realizes that he brought out booze just for her.

Missandei forces herself to not be fucking weird about being in a swimsuit in front of other people, so she forces herself to be super casual as she pulls the ends of the towel off her body and lays it on a wicker chair that is holding everyone else’s towels. She hears, “Shit, yes. Take it off. Let’s see that body,” and then Missy _immediately_ covers her body with her arms and hands in self-consciousness.

And _then_ she glares at Dany — though she doesn’t drop her hands off her chest. She says, “You’re a bitch. And I hate you.”

Dany is smiling viciously from inside the tub, her chin half submerged, steam rising in semi-transparent clouds that occasionally obscures her face. Dany then breaks the vibe and cackles. She kind of splashes Missandei’s toes with hot water. She says, “Oh my God, just get in. We have alcohol for youuu!”

 

 

  
They all pretty much start gossiping about Grey behind his back right away — once they are all congregated together in the tub. It starts when the last of them, Yara, walks out into the freezing cold with a little wiggle in her booty — barefoot and in her blue bikini like she is comfortable with her body. Missandei watches this and is like — what the hell? — before she internally rolls her eyes at herself and reaches out for her glass of wine again.

As Yara steps into the water — as she hisses at the drastic change in temperature, she also says, “I really hate to say it — but I like that guy — _so much.”_ It’s clear to the rest of them that she is talking about Grey. “We were just talking about cave diving, and he was telling me that all of the best spots are in his hood in the Summer Isles and that his brother is a really great diver — and I was like, oh my God, let’s be friends so you can take me to there, _shit._ What is Irri’s fucking deal? I would totally have sex with that guy.” Yara pauses. In a deadpan, she adds, “In payment for him taking me cave diving, I guess.”

Obara cranes her neck, as if trying to listen more carefully. She’s like, “Excuse me?”

As Yara submerges herself down to her chest, she says, “Babe, don’t worry about it.”

Dany admits that she really likes the guy, too. Like, she might like him more than she likes Drogo sometimes. Because Grey’s so conscientious and polite and thoughtful — which in turn offsets Drogo’s tendency to be a complete fucking asshole who curb-stomps all over other people’s needs and comfort.

Drogo is not even insulted by his wife’s assessment of him. He just dreamily says, “Yeah, he’s the best — I love him,” as he reaches out a wet arm to tinker with the bluetooth stereo — he’s replaying a song.

Jaime asks how it happened — Jaime glances at Tyrion, revealing that the two brothers have been chatting. Jaime clarifies and asks, what was the accident? Jaime’s interested — because of course he’s interested. Beyond the extraordinary nature of the injury, Jaime is also interested because of his own loss of his hand. He knows that this kind of loss is something that changes a person fundamentally.

Drogo loudly groans — contorting his face into a grimace. He says, “I don’t know if this is my story to tell — but then, it’s actually definitely my story to tell.” He shakes his head. He says, “It was actually all my fucking fault,” before he fully submerges himself, including his head, underneath the hot water. After he rises again, he is pretty stingy with the storytelling — which is so unlike him. He tells them he doesn’t feel right talking about it without Grey around. He tells them he needs Grey to be around so that he can constantly track Grey’s face, to make sure that he is retelling the story right.

 

 

  
His body is so sore and so damp from sweat — he’s sure he needs another shower — and he hears their muffled laughter from outside as he walks from the gym to his bedroom. He feels a little bit like maybe he made a mistake in ostracizing himself tonight.

There is a truism in his family that they all can agree on — and this is kind of rare because they all tend to be pretty opinionated. The truism is that they all drink a lot of water and that bananas are a good post-workout snack. His dad likes to say that potassium is good for muscle recovery. His brother likes to enthusiastically echo this. His mom likes to look at the interchange in gratitude, because she’s always so happy when his brother and his dad are getting along. She always keeps the house stocked with bananas for this reason.

He’s holding Missandei’s banana in his hand — she didn’t touch it, just left it in the cupholder because she likes to reject his smallass nice gestures because what the fuck, is he gross to her? So he swiped it, since she didn’t want it or seem to appreciate it. And Grey realizes that his mom might be brilliant and psychic. She was right to tell him to fucking share. Because he’d totally eat this banana himself like a punk if she hadn’t reminded him he had to share.

 

 

  
All of the bathrooms get commandeered as the lot of them flow back into the house. So Missandei changes in the privacy of her bedroom. As she pulls off the rest of her wet swimsuit, there’s a knock on her door. She _immediately_ covers her boobs with her arms and hands as her body tingles and heats up and her heart starts pounding. She freezes — and long seconds tick by before she realizes that whoever is on the other side of the door is not going to walk in on her while she is changing.

She hears another knock. She hears her name — “Missandei?” and she realizes that it’s him.

She scrambles. She drops her arms from her naked torso and she starts yanking up her damp towel. She’s cinching it and tucking it in a hurry as she says, “Just a second!”

He says, “Okay.”

She nearly trips herself as she jumps into her panties. She doesn’t even know why she has to put on her bottoms _right now,_ because the fluffy towel covers that entire bit of her body, but she just does things in a stupid panic sometimes. She shuffles to the door. Her fist is clenched in the terry cloth material, at her chest in between her breasts. She opens the door and says, “Hey.”

He’s not even fazed. He just looks her in the face with a vague sense of put-upon patience. Because he probably fucking _hates her_ now. No, he doesn’t hate her. She knows he doesn't hate her. He just thinks she’s awkward, and it is completely accurate.

He holds up a banana — she realizes it’s the banana. He also holds up a bunch of crinkly packets of almonds. He casually says, “You forgot your share of the snacks.”

She stares at him like — _what does this all mean!_ — because she has been constantly reminded that, sometimes, men are just being nice to her for no other reason than they are nice. It takes her another second or so to realize that he has figured out that she is still hungry — because she is so scared of accidentally getting glutened. When she realizes this — her face goes hotter. She says, “Oh,” and then she stutters out, “Thank you!”

And then she doesn’t think about it as she unclenches her hand from her towel to reach for the snacks with both limbs. The towel stays in place, but the draft that her hand leaves kind of freaks her out. She immediately goes back to holding onto her towel. And then she slowly shuts both of her eyes in frustration. Because this is the fucking worst.

The first time she went to a boy’s house before a school dance — she had to lie to do it because her mom and dad didn’t allow her to date in high school. She told her folks that she had to go over to Emmie’s house to do a school project. Her folks insisted that Emmie come over instead, so they could supervise. Missandei insisted that Emmie’s house had the right computer, the right encyclopedia set, the right cable TV, all the right tools for educational success. Missandei had to really make a case for studying at Emmie’s house. She only did it because she crushed on Calvin so hard. He seemed like he was on his way to being in love with her. He told her his parents really wanted to meet her and take photos.

For the trouble of her terrified disobedience, her parents found out she was actually at a dance anyway, because Moss found out through his friends that his baby sister was at a dance with a boy. He told on her while she was still at the dance. The fists of many gods rained down on her when she got home. After yelling terrible things at her like how she’s a whore, her dad was angry enough to tell her that he no longer had a daughter so she might as well just leave the fucking house and go live somewhere else.

To be threatened with disownment over a school dance felt really bleak — she couldn’t stop crying in front of their faces over it. Her weak crying just made him angrier. So she resorted to begging — she begged her dad not to kick her out of the house — because she knew that she had nowhere else to go. She knew her life was essentially ruined if she had to leave. Her mom begged for grace, too. Her mom begged her dad to reconsider, because Missandei can’t just drop out of school.

Then it got worse. She was pretty battered, emotionally, when she went to school the next day. Calvin was similarly weighted down, so he couldn’t pick up on the fact that he shouldn’t give her bad news right away. But he did. He told her that they couldn’t see each other anymore, because his parents did not realize that she is Black. He told her that, now they know, and now it’s a problem.

That incident didn’t really break her. She was actually pretty numb by the time she got to that point — by the time she arrived at his unwillingness to stand up for her. But she’s been through a lot of therapy. She pretty much knows the reasons why she is the way she is. Knowing doesn’t always help very much in the moment. Self-awareness is actually just the first step, in a long line of many, many steps.

Grey is watching her internal struggle. He is watching this bewildering fear flicker across her face. He is watching her white-knuckle the shit out of her towel like she’s scared he’s going to hurt her. She has no idea how he is interpreting all of it. He probably hates her — except probably not. Probably not completely. God.

He plainly says, “Do you just want me to leave your snacks on your bed, then?”

“Yes, please,” she says weakly. “Thank you.”

 

 

 

 


	8. Grey makes Missy breakfast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey generally smolders effortlessly and shows off his domestic skills. Missandei finally relaxes enough to crack jokes. Then Grey gets hit in the face by a tree. Then we learn more family of origin stuff!

 

 

 

  
After a restless night of twisting and turning in a strange bed that is too soft and smells entirely different from her bed at home, Missy groggily forces herself to get up early so that she can cook breakfast for everyone. She rubs her eyes, washes her face, quickly brushes her teeth, and pees in the semi-dark before she sluggishly shuffles out to the kitchen in her pajamas. She wishes that she could say she’s getting up early to make everyone breakfast because of altruism and love of her friends — but really, she just doesn’t want to accidentally get poisoned and the best way to ensure this is to cook everything herself.

She stops dead in her tracks when she sees his back at the stove — encased in a buttery swatch of yellow overhead light from the fan. She hears bacon sizzling.

He notices that he is not alone pretty quickly. He looks over his shoulder at her real quick before turning his attention back to the stove. He says, “Oh. Hey. Mornin’” His tone is low and also muddled and thick — sleepy. He adds, “There’s coffee over there,” jutting his chin at the pot next to the sink. “Still hot,” he mutters. Then — because she’s saying a shit-ton of nothing back at him, he also adds, “You want food? I’m par-cooking this and then leaving it in the oven until whenever. It’s not perfect — but it’s easy.” She sees him shrug. “I can finish off a few strips and fry up some eggs if you want to eat now, though?”

Missandei already knows she’s going to be talking about this — like, _a lot_ — in her next therapy session with Olenna. She’s going to be talking about why this shit just makes her so _stupid._

She forces herself to say something. She ends up blurting out, “I can’t eat gluten.”

He pauses — his body just immobile for a second, as the bacon continues to sizzle — then he says, “I know.” Then he says, “Does bacon have gluten in it?”

“It shouldn’t,” she stutters out. “But it can. Like, it might have a lot of gluten in it if the marinade has gluten in it, or it could have trace amounts if it was processed in a shared facility. Or maybe when you took it out of the package — maybe you forgot you handled bread before you touched the bacon — ”

“I didn’t touch bread before I handled the bacon,” he interjects.

She assumes that he’s offended — which is something she has encountered before — mostly whenever her brothers’ ex-girlfriends cooked for her and she tried to go over all of her food stuff and they were casually like, ‘Oh, I know’ and then basically threw a lit match into her intestinal gut and set it ablaze. This is why Missandei backtracks really fast and says, “Oh, I didn’t mean to say that you would ever intentionally cross-contaminate food — but sometimes people are not watching for it, and there are a lot of touch points where contamination could’ve happen. I didn’t mean to say that you’d do anything on purpose.”

“Ah,” he says blandly, turning off the stove. She bites her bottom lip nervously. She feels like he’s probably mad at her. And then he turns around to face her fully. He says, “So what I did was I washed the cutting board, skillet, and tongs with soap and hot water. Then I washed both of my hands. Then I opened the package over the sink. Then I put the raw bacon on a plate, over the cutting board as the skillet heated up. I did not add any extra fat to the skillet — just the bacon. I really tried not to touch anything else while it was cooking, but I’m not ruling out the possibility. And that’s about where we’re currently at.”

Okay, she was wrong. It’s actually going to be _this part_ that will completely take over the entirety of her next therapy session.

She stares at him mutely — he’s maintaining eye contact — he probably totally does not understand why she’s behaving like this. He probably completely does not get that she’s actually really touched. Dany is probably the only other person that does this sort of thing for her with the same sort of intention and deliberateness. Even her mom is kind of sloppy and kind of treats it as something she has to indulge her hysterical daughter in.

He says, “Is it okay?”

She blinks rapidly. She says, “Um, what kind of bacon is this — like, what brand.”

“Oh!” he says, “Shit, I dunno.” He’s putting the tongs down, directly on the empty plate right next to the stove. He’s walking over to the garbage can and flipping up the top with his foot on the mechanism.

She’s telling him, “Oh, you don’t have to dig in the garbage —”

And he’s saying, “Nah, it’s right here,” as he plucks up the packaging and holds it up to his face, reading the ingredients. And then he realizes he doesn’t actually know what he’s looking for, so he leans over and hands it over to her.

She takes the label and reads it over. It is totally gluten-free. And he is so ridiculously nice, and it is crazy. She raises her face. Her fingers are greasy from the packaging. She says, “We’re good.”

He smiles. He says, “Awesome.” And then he goes back to the sink to wash his hands.

 

 

  
They have an entire hour before anyone else wakes up. She ends up teaching him how she makes scrambled eggs. It’s not revolutionary by any means, but he acts pretty cool with the lesson — he asks questions that make her feel a little silly because he is just being _so nice_ and politely showing interest even though he clearly knows how to cook eggs. Like, he asks her what consistency she is looking for. He asks her if it matters if the eggs are brown or white. She answers the latter question really straight and seriously — until she glances up at his face and realizes that he is _totally fucking with her._

It makes her duck her head back down again — shyly. She has to hide her smile into the floor as her heart kind of speeds up — and not in panic. It is still anxiety, but it is a different kind of anxiety.

She eats breakfast squished on a chair, with her feet pulled up on the seat and a plate balanced on her knees. He sits like normal at the table, facing it, so he is kind of perpendicular to her.

They talk about really bland things — and she’s pretty jazzed about it. They talk about how they both had a little bit of trouble sleeping in different beds. They talk about how it’s really, really cold outside. They talk about snowboarding. As he scarfs down his eggs and eats in a way that is devoid of self-consciousness, she tells him that he’s stunningly good at snowboarding. He snorts and nicely rejects the compliment by saying that everyone keeps saying that to him. It’s nice of them. But he has skied before. The skill transfers over. He shrugs.

She tells him that she goes a couple of times a year — because of Dany. Yet she doesn’t get much better.

“Can I give you a tip?” he says, as he chews through his eggs. He puts a lot of hot sauce on his eggs.

She cuts up her small piece of bacon with her front teeth. There’s lot of stuff she could probably say, if she was more comfortable around him. She could tell him that people like to preface forced advice-giving with that sort of statement, and it’s usually not really asking for permission — she’s going to hear the tip no matter what, right? She could also tease him about having the gall to give her a tip when he seriously learned how to snowboard like, _yesterday._ And if they were really familiar and if she was really, really comfortable with him, she could also make a sex joke — about him giving her just a tip. But as such, they are nothing to each other, and he also has a really complicated thing going on in his pants — probably — and so maybe she can never get to the point where she can make sex jokes with Grey like she makes sex jokes with Tyrion.

In her crazy epic pause, he elaborates. He says, “You don’t have to accept it. You don’t have to hear what I have to say. You can be like, ‘Shut up, dude. I’m fine.’”

“No, I wanna know. What’s your tip?”

“I don’t have one.”

And then they both freeze — she’s freezing in horror as her mind just fights to figure out if he means what she thinks he means or if her mind is just fucking _filthy_ right now — and he’s freezing in anticipation. He’s freezing with this ghost of a smile on his face as he searches her face with his eyes for her face’s next move.

She says, _“What?”_ as her face just _burns._ It’s probably burning so hard that it is changing color — changing colors in a detectable way.

Grey cracks up. He laughs into his almost empty plate and his fork rattles against the ceramic with each giggle.

She doesn’t even think about it as she reaches a hand out to roughly shove his shoulder. She’s still in the habit of trying to physically hit her brothers whenever one of them goes out of his way to embarrass her. She says, “Oh my gosh! You suck!” And then immediately, again in horror, she says, “Shut up! _Nooo!”_

He buries his laugh in his hand, as he looks at her with crinkles in the corners of his eyes. When he looks directly at her and catches her horrified eyes, he starts cracking up again.

“Do you even really have an actual tip?” She momentarily shuts her eyes tightly as she mentally beats herself up. Then she opens them and says, “Like, do you actually have advice?”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice muffled behind his hand. “I was actually gonna say you should consider getting a little drunk before hitting the slopes. I’d typically never recommend drinking and then doing something semi-dangerous, but you’re kinda stiff and rigid, and I think being a little tipsy will help your body relax and get comfortable with the bumps and twists on the slopes.”

 

 

  
When Dany and Drogo walk down the stairs into the kitchen, they see Grey and Missandei sitting at the kitchen table together, at completely a healthy and normal distance from each other. They are just chatting. Missandei is curled up on the chair, holding her body in a tight little ball. And when Missy spots Dany and Drogo — she scrambles to her feet and stands up as if they have caught her doing something wrong. She stands to attention and says, “Oh, hey guys!”

Grey holds up his coffee cup to them — pretty casual and unruffled. He says, “Hey. Morning.”

 

 

  
Missandei decides that she isn’t comfortable getting drunk and hitting the slopes — as great as that advice was. So she just bundles herself in her gear, pops her goggles on over her eyes, and starts slipping and sliding around, trying to avoid speed demon children who are a million times better at this than she is.

There’s a short moment when he smoothly turns in front of her and comes to a stop. He’s about ready to go off with Drogo again, but before he does, he asks her, “Hey, you want another tip? Like, for real this time. Get your head out of the gutter, Missandei.”

Her face breaks out in a silent laugh. She’s trying to swallow it down. He’s watching her struggle to straighten her face, as his own mouth quivers a little bit. She ends up smiling bashfully up at him. And then she tries to push past that by saying, “What’s your tip?”

“I’ve been watching you. I think your hips are a little too far forward and is throwing off your weight distribution. Try resetting every now and then. Pull yourself back to your heels, man.”

“Oh my God,” she says, stunned. “That’s helpful.”

He gives her a grin before he takes off, following after Drogo.

 

 

  
The rest of the day for Missandei is just so awesome. Dany decides that she wants to take a break from sliding around on the snow, so she books the two of them a few hours at a spa. Missandei’s massage therapist is probably the strongest woman in the world, so Missandei has to internally muffle her screams of pain as the woman kneads her sore muscles with her brick-like hands.

Afterward, over martinis, Missandei tells Dany that that was probably the fanciest spa she’s ever been to. She tells Dany she usually gets massages when she visits her extended family in Naath — because massages are cheap there and also because it’s cultural. Women go to salons there to bond and to pass the time and to stay beautiful and stuff —

“So the same reasons we got to the spa here,” Dany supplies, spread out in her armchair, hiding her smile behind her foggy glass. She looks positively regal.

“No, it’s different,” Missy says. “At home, it’s not fancy. We just get taken into a dark room in the back of a salon somewhere with a bunch of other women. Then we’re all told to get completely naked and to lie face down. It’s fun and disorienting! I’ll take you sometime! I wanna show you around Naath one of these days!”

 

 

  
It takes Drogo and Grey forever to come back to the cabin — as predicted, but Dany still worries a little bit. She exhibits her worry by shaking a cocktail shaker vigorously and making ice-cold dry martinis for everyone. Her pours are precise and not a drop is wasted, as she primly tells them that it’s possible that Drogo and Grey are just fucking dead right now — and none of them know yet. Dany tells them that it’s possible that Drogo and Grey will just never come back home — and their frozen bodies will only be discovered after a search and rescue team descends into some secret crevasse or something.

When Drogo and Grey finally show up — about half an hour later — Dany is drunk. When she sees her husband in the front door way — after he has made a loud ruckus pulling off his boots and stripping off his coat — she kisses him on the lips and tells him that she wondered if he was dead due to his own foolhardiness and tendency to make poor decisions.

Drogo says, “Nah, babe, sorry. Still alive.” His face is flushed and he is grinning. He says, “Sort of.” This is when he steps aside and they all see that Grey’s face — his cheek — has a shallow but bloody slash on it.

“Whoa!” Missandei says in alarm.

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters. He says it like he is so annoyed. “A tree hit me in the fucking face.”

 

 

  
After wiping down his face, changing out of his clothes, and taking a hot shower, Grey washes down two more white tablets that Drogo puts into his palm. He washes down the painkillers with a martini. Dany completely does not approve — she doesn’t think Grey should drink hard alcohol with his drugs, but Drogo tells her to just “chillax.” He tells her that Grey is “fine.”

Dany slathers antibiotic ointment onto Grey’s cut as she tells him that he’s an idiot for being out with Drogo after it got dark. She is in the midst of peeling apart a bandaid when a bunch of them start arguing about whether it’s better to air-dry the scratch or if it’s better to keep it wet. Yara, Jaime, and Drogo think it’s best to keep it dry. Missandei doesn’t have a strong opinion here. Tyrion, Dany, and Obara think it’s best to cover it up.

Grey takes the bandaid from Dany and tries to apply it to his own face, without a mirror. Dany tuts, grabs his wrist, says, “Stop it!” and pulls the sticky bandaid from his hands and applies it herself.

Grey is swaying from the booze — maybe a combo of booze and painkillers — because he slurs as he says, “My dad’s a doctor. He says it’s better to keep wounds covered. Better to prevent infection. And I think it also helps with healing and scarring.”

“Your dad’s a doctor?” Tyrion asks. “I wasn’t expecting that. I figured he was like — you know —”

“A janitor?” Grey supplies.

“Okay, rude,” Tyrion says. “I was gonna say construction worker.”

This makes Grey laugh all sloppily.

“What about your mom?” Tyrion asks. “What’s her job?”

“She’s general counsel for a large nonprofit.”

“No shit!”

Yara swats at Tyrion. She says, “Can you stop sounding so surprised? It’s making me uncomfortable sitting next to you!”

He pulls his body away from her. He wards her off with his hand as he says, “I’m not surprised because it’s like, oh, his skin color is so dark therefore it’s impossible for his parents to be educated. I’m surprised because it costs a lot of time and money to earn a law degree, and it costs a lot of time and money to earn a medical degree. That’s hard for people who come here with nothing.”

“It’s true,” Grey chimes in. “My dad actually was a janitor. When he first came over. His eye was always on becoming a doctor again though — I mean, he was already a doctor back home — he just had to run through an insane gauntlet when we came over here to become a doctor again ‘cause, you know, racism. No I’m just kidding. But no, for real. It was nuts. And my mom went back to school after I finished college, actually. She’s only been practicing law a few years, but it’s something she had always wanted to do.”

“That’s crazy,” Tyrion says. “That’s not the typical story. That’s great. Wow. And Obara — your folks?”

“Doesn’t count,” Obara says. “Or not the same kind of story. My dad was born rich.”

“Oh, cool,” Tyrion says, looking at Jaime, Daenerys, and Yara. “So just like us.”

“Not quite,” Obara says.

“And I know that Drogo’s mom owns a salon — and Missandei comes from a bunch of cops.”

“Oh, seriously?” Grey asks, looking at Missandei.

“Yeah,” Tyrion says, answering for her, just as she’s opening her mouth to speak. “Her dad’s a cop. Her oldest brother is a cop. Her middle brother is a cop. All cops. They are all scary as shit, too. Her dad worked like, most of his career in homicide before he started pushing paper.”

 

 

 

 


	9. Missy is a hot mess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Grey delivers a rousing spirit-crushing speech about the future love of his life. The future love of his life completely loses her shit because she has a complicated relationship with her parents.

 

 

 

After his parents get over the white-flesh-colored bandaid on his face, they start grilling his ass about Missandei — like a lot. Like, it’s really fucking annoying. It reminds him of the time his parents grilled him about which medical school he was going to apply to. It also reminds him of the time his parents grilled him about what the fuck he was going to do in life, if not medicine? It also reminds him of the many, many times they were all living under one roof and his mom stumbled upon the toilet with a shit-ton of pee sprayed all over it and grilled him to find out if it was his fault or if it was Azzie’s fault. He maintained it was Azzie’s fault, but Azzie — that liar — told their mom it was Grey’s fault.

Basically, his parents just behave completely in-character — like how they have been behaving for years.

During dinner, his dad does not even tear his eyes away from the TV screen as he randomly says to Grey, “She’s so pretty. She’s way prettier than you are.”

Grey is like, “Okay,” as he shoves some boiled carrots into his face, because he has learned to just succumb to the onslaught. There’s no point in fighting it, much like there’s no point in fighting against an ocean current.

“She might even be smarter than you are — shit, how many languages does she speak again?”

“I don’t know,” Grey says.

“Why don’t you know, Nudho?” his dad demands.

“I never asked.”

“Here’s some advice about women — they like it when you ask them questions about themselves. They like it when you learn things about them.”

“It’s true, baby,” his mom says.

Grey swallows his carrots. He says, “Okay.”

And he refrains from telling his parents that they are just fucking lunatics. They are superficial. They are just wrapped up in the idea of Missandei because they _saw her_ and they saw that she is a beautiful woman with brown skin — and so they went _apeshit_ over that, because of course they did. They are assuming that the number one quality he gives a shit about is physical attractiveness. They are also assuming that he’s a fucking moron, like he is self-centered and like he does not even know how to talk to other humans and ask them questions about themselves. They are assuming that he and Missandei don’t have wildly awkward interactions with each other, that she doesn’t constantly look at him like how every other straight, single woman looks at him — like she thinks he’s cute in the way women think fluffy dogs are cute, like she’s super scared that the cute fluffy dog is going to try to hump her even though he is fixed, like she’s super scared that she’s going to have to take some time out of her life and go through the labor of kindly rejecting his offputting advances.

His parents are currently acting like his life is forever incomplete because he had something bad happen to him at a young age. His parents — who are back-breakingly hard on him when it comes to educational and professional achievement — are acting like his romantic standards _have to be low_ or _nonexistent_ because of this terrible thing that happened to him at a young age — that he has to just accept whatever is offered to him — that he’s not allowed to be discerning because he does not have the luxury of being discerning because his options are so limited and he’s not worthy of more.

“You should ask her out to dinner,” his mom suggests. “Sometimes, women are just waiting to be asked.”

“Ah, probably _not_ gonna do that,” Grey says, grimacing.

“She might say yes, son,” his dad says. “Hell, be fucking optimistic for once.”

“Oh, she’s definitely going to say yes if I ask her,” Grey tells his parents, as he carefully puts down his glass of water. “Because that’s the kind of person she is. She is a people-pleaser, and she is scared of saying no because she is scared of voicing a strong opinion about anything — for what reason, I don’t know. I haven’t asked her. I haven’t asked her because I honestly do not care enough to go deep with her. I have my own issues that I busted my ass working through. I don’t really feel like taking on the real or _imagined_ issues of a really beautiful, able-bodied woman who is intelligent, has a good job — but who is completely _devoid_ of personality because she didn’t work through her microscopic issues. I think it’s inconvenient that she is so insecure. I know I’m not the greatest catch, what with an awesome job, an awesome face, ninety-nine percent of an awesome body, and this fucking awesome _personality,_ but I still think I am allowed to _not_ be attracted to her low self-esteem and her lack of confidence even though _I get it._ Sometimes it’s _so hard_ not having to work very much at being fucking beautiful, intelligent, and talented. Like, if that was my problem in life, I’d have a fucking complex about it, too, I guess. Okay, I’m sounding really bitter. I’m actually not. I’m just saying — she is still a nice person, despite not really having a point of view or original thought on _anything,_ so I think I’ll still try and be friends with her — or friendly at least. Because we have a lot of people in common, and I don’t want it to be _more awkward_ than it _already is._ So. Do you still want me to ask her out to dinner?”

His dad is staring at him, mouth agape. His mom looks like she can’t decide between encouraging her son’s self-confidence or reaching out and slapping him for what he just said, in regard to a woman.

His dad finally recovers. His dad actually chuckles. And says, “Holy shit, Nudho. You’re a _savage!”_ He looks at Grey’s mom. He points at Grey as he talks to her. He says, “Sanaa, that’s our son!”  
  
“Yeah, I can see that,” his mom says, cutting into her tender chicken with a butterknife.

“You’re actually right, son,” his dad says, trying not to release the full force of his shit-eating grin, lest it aggravates Grey’s mom. “The really beautiful ones tend to be a little bit bland and boring. That’s why I ended up with your mom.”

His dad even starts flinching before his mom’s hand makes swift contact with his face. He’s laughing as he catches her hand after the smack and holds onto it tightly, as she struggles to remove it from his grasp. He’s laughing as says, “Baby! I was saying that you are beautiful and bland, not that you are homely and interesting.”

 _“This_ is where he gets it from!” his mom shouts, still trying to extract her hand. _“You_ are where he gets this from!”

 

 

  
There’s a really tense energy when Missy walks into her parents' house — and so she surmises that they are fighting — they were probably fighting right before she came in.

It’s just her for dinner tonight because it’s been a little while since she’s gone through the stack of their mail and looked at their accounts. She’s pretty much in charge of her dad’s pension because he’s a reformed alcoholic gambler who is terrible with finances — so it’s definitely not a great idea to let him loose on his pension. Her brothers are lazy about stuff like this, and her mom is not particularly good with money either, so Missandei takes the responsibility onto herself even though she doesn’t particularly want it. She just doesn’t want her parents to run out of money in retirement.

Her dad tries to flip his rage-frown upside down when he sees her walk in. These days, her dad works really hard to get along with her consistently because at some point, it finally sunk in for him — that her presence in his life is conditional. He has to be nice to her. He can’t treat her like a punching bag just because he feels upset inside. He has to constantly remember that he probably loves her more than he loves anyone else in life.

When he sees her, he stops wiping the counter with a dishcloth. He reaches out to hug her. He kisses her on the temple as he says, “Hey, monkey. You look a little tired.”

Missandei laughs. She grasps his forearms and she says, “Thanks, Daddy. I actually feel pretty well-rested.”

“Well, it doesn’t show at all,” her dad cracks. And then he gestures for her to sit down at the kitchen table.

She has definitely noticed that her mom has not said one word yet — not to her in greeting — not even a look. When Missy was younger, she used to interpret these intense silences as condemnation of her, of something she did. Now, she tries to look at it glass half-full. Her mom is probably refraining from talking to her because if her mom opens her mouth, all of her mother’s anger toward her father will just come spilling out.

Her dad is a complete and total asshole sometimes. When her mom drops pots of food onto the table stiffly — with tension in her arms — Missandei’s dad pointedly says to her mom, “The food isn’t very hot, is it?”

“Um, it’s okay,” Missy says, standing back up, grabbing a clay pot. “Let me nuke some of these things then.”

“Why isn’t it hot?” her dad says, leaning over, trying to look at her mom’s face.

Missandei freezes. She waits for it.

And then her mom _snaps._ Her mom starts sniping in the Naathi language — because her mom’s command of the Common Tongue has never been very strong when her mom is emotional. Her mom is telling her dad to cook the food himself next time. Her dad immediately starts shouting back, also in-language.

Missandei starts counting down the minutes. She probably has to hang out here for a solid twenty minutes, eating as much food as she can before she leave this shitshow, so that it doesn’t feel weird or off, so that she can fulfill her familial duties properly.

 

 

  
She shows up to her therapy session just really angry and pissed and tired — because she ended up staying at her parents' house the other night for a long time. She ended up staying a while because after fighting with each other at the top of their lungs like they don’t even give a shit, Missandei’s dad went and retrieved a letter that he got from his pension fund. It was a letter full of legalese, which he asked Missandei to translate. She actually is not a lawyer, so she didn’t really know how to translate it in a way that was accurate. The letter really vaguely stated that his pension payments are suspended because he didn’t pay his dues.

Her blood ran cold — because she’s in charge of paying her dad’s dues. She forgot.

She copped to it. When her dad asked her how the fuck his account can be suspended because of course his dues are paid, Missandei had to confess to him that she actually forgot and she is _so sorry._

He was actually pretty cool about it, all things considered. And she promised him she’d fix it.

Today, in between actually working, she has been trying to hunt down someone from his pension office — but of course it’s impossible and of course a million people have given her the runaround. She keeps losing her mind over the possibility that maybe her dad’s pension is just _gone_ now because of this mistake — his retirement may just be fucked because of an oversight — but how could that even be fucking _true?_

She ends up talking to Olenna about all of this — her parents’ fight, the pension thing, her own idiocy, her old fears of failing her parents, her inability to think clearly when she is emotional, her resentment of her brothers for checking out of stuff like this because they say they are busy, like her time is not as valuable as theirs, her resentment of her mom for never standing up for herself, for not leaving her dad, for just putting up with the ongoing emotional abuse, the loneliness of being the youngest daughter, her own guilt for not backing up her mom enough, for victim-blaming so much.

Missandei has to waste yet another session on her family even though she originally had these grand plans to tell Olenna about Grey and how he made her feel — and what it could mean, not for him and her and the two of them together. Of course not that. But just for her, what these feelings could mean for her.

“I’m pretty sure your dad’s pension is not just gone,” Olenna says gently. “That’s generally not how it works.”

“Yeah,” Missandei says, sighing, digging her hands into her hair. “I figured. I just want it confirmed by someone at that office, but no one knows a thing and no one is returning my calls. I’m just obsessing over the possibility that all his money is gone, though. I’m just kicking myself so hard for the mistake. I don’t know why it wasn’t in my calendar. I don’t know what the hell I was _thinking_ or _not thinking.”_

 

  
After therapy, she feels raw and like she is on the verge of crying, as she fights through traffic to get to dinner with her friends. She is going to be half an hour late because there is an accident on the road, so that is amazing. She hopes that someone fucking died because this delay is just atrocious. She texts Yara and asks Yara to tell everyone else to just please start without her.

She actually ends up being forty minutes late — because parking takes an assload of time, too. And when she gets there, she sees that they all fucking waited for her, even though she asked them not to. She sees Tyrion smile. She sees Tyrion open his mouth to make some sort of clever comment.

Tyrion says, “You know what your white boyfriend would say in a time like this? He’d say, ‘Well, look what the cat dragged in!’”  
  
This is an ongoing joke. It’s a joke design to mock her because she is forever unloved and alone — and also because she doesn’t exhibit enough stereotypical Black female traits like outspoken sassiness, an ability to dance in a sexualized way, or an aggressive tendency to make people believe that she can ever cut a bitch — so of course she’d have a hypothetical dorky white boyfriend who is a gentle and emotional lover. That is the joke.

Missandei is usually a little bit cooler with it. She usually adds to the racist joke because she understands that she is a fucking Oreo, and she and Tyrion are really good friends.

But today, she is just fucking over it. She gestures to a server — who might not even be _their_ server. She tells Tyrion, “I need a fucking drink before I talk to you.”

Tyrion immediately gets serious. He says, “Hey, are you okay?”

 

 

  
Missandei tells them that she’s fine, and they totally do not believe her because she repeats it about three times in succession. Each repetition sounds more and more hysterical than the one that came before.

Her friends ordered appetizers while they waited for her, and when the salads and pate arrives, she stares at the basket of bread and crackers all suspiciously and hatefully — and she asks the server if there is gluten in the salad or the pate.

She gets told no, there is no gluten in the salad or pate. So Missandei starts eating off the communal plate, shoving lettuce leaves and chunks of congealed liver mincemeat into her mouth. She tells them she’s famished. And when her cocktail arrives, she starts to greedily drink that, too. And then she orders another.

As Dany reaches out and pulls some of Missandei’s curls off of her hot neck. Dany touches Missandei’s cheek with the back of her hand to check Missandei’s temperature. Missandei tells them all she had a rough day — obviously — but she is fine now. She is fine. She is totally just fine.

 

 

  
At the end of night — at the end of dinner — Grey just reaches out and takes her keys right out of her hand and is like, “Yeah, you can’t drive right now.” He looks at his friends and the rest of them pretty much nod in unison. It’s pretty unanimous. Missandei shouldn’t be trying to go out and vehicular-manslaughtering people right now.

“I wasn’t going to drive,” she says, kind of annoyed that everyone apparently thinks she’s an _idiot_ and an _asshole._ “Obviously I can’t drive right now. I can’t even walk straight. I was gonna leave my car here and take a cab home, and then I was probably gonna go get my car tomorrow morning.”

“Babe, it’s your lucky day,” Drogo says. “Grey can drive your drunk, emotional ass home.” 

 

 

He is available to drive her home because he went straight from work to dinner — he just took the subway and walked it. He was just gonna impose on Drogo and Dany for the millionth time in life and have them go out of their way to drop him off at his parents’ house after dinner and holy shit, he really needs to buy a car already.

But change of plans. Shit happens. Sometimes friends show up to dinner a hot mess, before guzzling down so many drinks and not paying her share of the check because she apparently left her purse in the car and Dany just didn’t care about covering Missandei’s bill.

Grey kind of expects Missandei’s car window to be smashed in when they get there, because of the purse that is sitting in the passenger seat. But actually, her car is totally in one piece and no one thought to steal her designer bag at all.

He’s about to laughingly tell her that she’s one lucky motherfucker, but when he turns to look at her, he suddenly says, “Oh shit,” as he bends his knees, as he stoops down to catch her underneath her armpits, as her face plants itself into his collarbone, as her legs just buckle and she starts sinking toward the sidewalk like a sack of bones.

“Oh, sorry, lost my balance there,” she says absently, simultaneously grabbing onto his shirt with one fist and reaching out to grasp her sweaty fingers to her smooth car with her other hand. She knocks into him so that his back smacks into her car window. She says, “Oops.”

 

 

  
As he starts up her car, she announces to him that she’s not going to start spontaneously sobbing — so he needn’t worry about that. He gives her some quick side-eye as he maneuvers her car out of the parallel parking spot. He tells her that he wasn’t even thinking about anguished sobbing at all, but okay, good to know.

She suddenly laughs — it sounds a little bit hopeless, so that is worrisome — and she says, “Thanks so much for this! Thanks for driving me home! You’re so nice! You’re just — so nice!”

 

 

  
She starts barfing — almost right away — when they reach her apartment. She runs to the toilet and starts retching loudly as he looks around her place in curiosity. It’s small and modern-contemporary. The cabinets are dark and the pulls are sleek brushed nickel. She has a killer view of the city. Rent is probably pricey. She must be paid fairly well. There are sliding doors and room dividers in lieu of doors and walls — this is why her puking is so loud.

He opens up her fridge to hunt for a bottle of water. He finds that it’s pretty clean and pretty empty — he only observes this because his parents’ fridge is shoved to the gills with all sorts of shit. He also finds a water filter in there.

He pours glasses of water for her and for himself.

She walks out of the bathroom barefoot. Her makeup is all smeared from face-rubbing, sweat, and from when she face-planted into him. Some of her foundation and eyeliner is on the collar of his shirt.

He slides the glass of water to her side of the kitchen island. He says, “Cool place.”

She says, “Thanks,” as she grabs at the water. She takes a few long gulps, emptying out about half of the glass. She gasps loudly when she breaks away from the glass. She puts it down. She thinks that he probably thinks she’s a fucking psycho. And it’s cool. It’s totally fine. She says, “I’m worried I may have accidentally gotten my dad’s entire retirement drained because I’m inept.”

He raises his brows. He says, “Oh. Yeah. That’s stressful.”

 

 

  
She tells him he should sleep over. She does not make any sex joke about it because she just doesn’t think to. He easily agrees to sleeping over because he has already worked through his options — he can go home with her car just to sleep in his bed and then come all the fuck back here in the morning to give her back her car — and _then_ she has to drop him back at his parents place. Or he can pony up money for a long cab ride, which he doesn’t think he should have to because he’s the good guy here. She should actually give him tons of money for the cab ride because she is causing this inconvenience. Or he can just sleep over.

He is relieved that she arrived at the same conclusion he did. He was afraid she was going to be a drunk idiot bastard and just wish him a good night as she shut the door in his face and left him to figure out how the hell he was going to get home at this time of night.

She asks, “Wanna sleep in my bed? It’s a king size bed.”

He plainly says, “I don’t think that’s fair.” And he says that because he initially thinks that she is offering to _give up_ her bed to him. He has already blurted out his response before he realizes that she actually meant for him to sleep in her bed with her. He thinks it’s kind of strange that she is usually a tight bundle of some extreme nerves and anxiety — but right now, she is letting a fucking strange guy into her bed — and _then_ he belatedly realizes that he’s probably not threatening to her whatsoever, because he has no dick. Christ, his brain is so slow tonight — is _he_ drunk, too?

She looks weirdly offended by his response. She says, “Oh. _Okay_ then. I can make up the couch for you, then.” She is offended by his response because she thinks he meant that it’s not fair for him to be subjected to her any further. She wants to be like, well-fuck-you-dude about it. But he actually was super nice in driving her home. So she bites her tongue.

 

 

  
She sees Grey start pulling at the knot in his tie as he settles himself on her couch. His shoes are still on. And that spurs her into action. She realizes that shit, she is being a terrible host right now.

She scurries into her bedroom and starts digging around in a basket in her closet. She digs and digs until she unearths a King’s Landing PD t-shirt and matching shorts. These belong to one of her brothers.

Grey must’ve thought she just abandoned him without even saying goodnight like a jerk, because when she walks back out into the living room, his tie is off and he’s unbuttoning his shirt.

She’s like, “Whoa,” because the sight of a man taking off his shirt in her apartment is like — it is pretty fucking nuts.

He looks up at her, and he freezes. And then he is like, “Hey. Sup?”

She holds up her brother’s clothes. She says, “I got stuff for you to wear to bed! These belong to my brother!”

“That’s weird and kinky — but okay,” he says. And before she can laugh — and she planned on laughing — he loudly says, “That was a joke, Missandei! Sheesh!”

 

 

 


	10. Grey is poisoned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey gets sick and coincidentally, is terrible and rude when he is not feeling well. Missy sees the object of her affection almost naked — which inspires her to lay down her own epic speech about why they would not work. These crazy kids!

 

 

 

Her head is _pounding_ when she wakes up. Her tongue is rancid from bacteria growth on top of sour vomit. Her hair is scratching her face because she was sloppy and didn’t wrap it up before falling asleep. And every breath inward risks a violent, wet convulsion and more of her pouring her bile and saliva out of her throat.

Long before she diagnosed herself with celiac and got it confirmed by a doctor, she was just sick a lot as a kid. She had to miss school a lot and be isolated from her peers.

In his younger days, his dad carried this legend among the extended family. Her dad is mean as hell, and strong like an ox. Her brothers followed in her dad’s footsteps — both athletic, big, strong, healthy, never ever sick a day in their lives.

So her physical weakness was just mind-breaking for him. He alternated between thinking that Missandei was faking illness to avoid school or thinking that Missandei was just a really frail weakling and maybe she couldn’t possibly be his child. The fact that she looks so much like her mother and not very much like him was sometimes a point of contention. Her dad cheated on her mom a few times, yet he found it within himself to be really paranoid and angry over the idea that the same breach of trust was being enacted upon him. There were these times he angrily and drunkenly told Missandei she wasn’t really his daughter — whenever she misbehaved, like by doing stuff like offering an opinion that wasn’t his opinion. There were these terrible times during her teenage years when she wore something he didn’t like — like shorts that fell above her knees — and he called her a whore just like her mother.

There were also times he came home from work after witnessing just terrible atrocities that happened to children and women, and he grabbed her from her bed, woke her up, and just took her to a late night diner to just eat breakfast food and talk about just _nothing_ at all. There were also times like when he cried in public when she graduated from high school as valedictorian — and again when she graduated from college with honors.

Because she was immersed in the mode of always having to prove her health — or her illness — Missandei is an expert on how she physically feels. She can pick out when she gets glutened — because that feels different from asthma or allergies or general soreness or general nausea.

She knows that she’s totally just hungover like crazy right now. She didn’t get glutened.

After she gingerly gets up and grabs a few loose fitting clothes from her closet, she stands in her doorway and she watches Grey sleep like a real creep. He’s on his side. He’s tucked into the back of her couch, facing it, tightly cuddled into it. She thinks that it is actually so cute.

She generally examines how it feels — to have another person intimately in her apartment like this, how it feels not to wake up alone. She tries to ascertain whether or not it’s drawing out feelings of anxiety, or if it’s something else — like this warmness and this comfort and this marvel over the novelty of it all. She wonders if she can progress and if she can allow or invite more of this in the future. She tells herself what she wanted to tell Olenna — that the thyroid medication _must_ be working.

 

 

  
Missandei is in the shower when he is jolted awake by his ringing phone, which rattles loudly against her glass coffee table. He groans and groggily palms for it — inaccurately because he’s in a strange and foreign place.

When he finally grabs it and looks at who is calling him, he is like, oh shit. Because it’s his dad who is calling him.

He rubs his face roughly, trying to quickly clear the fog out of his head before he answers. It’s no use though. He’s just fucked no matter what.

His voice is thick and a dead giveaway, when he says, “Hullo? Dad?”

He gets yelled at — pretty much right off the bat. His dad is telling him what time it is — it is nine in the morning. His dad is telling him this really embellished tale about how he and Grey’s mom went to bed at ten o’clock and observed that he wasn’t home yet — but they made the judicious decision to leave it be because he’s a full grown adult and he doesn’t need his parents on his balls all the fucking time. But imagine their surprise when they got up for the day and noticed that their son never came home. Naturally, they assumed the worst, but convinced themselves of the best. They figured he probably fell asleep at Drogo’s house or something, and just forgot to text them so they don’t worry. So naturally, they send him a few messages. And of course, he never responds to them even though he is pretty much always awake by seven.

So of course they think he’s fucking dead — that he got fucking murdered somewhere. Because to not let his parents know where he is is just _wildly_ sloppy and out of character for him. Is his name fucking Azzie? What the fuck?

Grey groggily says, “Dad, I’m sorry. I stayed up late. Then I fell asleep. And I’m only just now waking up. I didn’t mean to freak you guys out — but really, why did you go straight to murder?”

This is when Missandei walks out of her bathroom, carefully toweling her hair. She cheerily announces, “I don’t have a toothbrush for you, but you can use mine if you want!”

To her, but also into the receiver of his phone, he says, “What the fuck?” because he doesn’t understand how she is so upbeat — and he also does not understand why they’d share a toothbrush. That is kind of disgusting.

In his ear, his dad is immediately like, _“Who_ is that? _Where_ are you? Who are you with? Is that _Missandei?”_

 

 

  
It’s crazy, but she’s in a great mood and he is the one who looks and feels like walking death. He might be coming down with something, because his head is pounding and his entire body is aching. He initially thinks that it’s due to sleeping on her couch all night — but by the time he has redressed himself in his suit, he realizes that he is probably actually getting sick. He is probably running a fever because his body and his face are so hot.

He doesn’t clue her in on this. Instead, he just asks, “How are you not hungover?”

“Oh, I’m totally hungover,” she says, standing in front of him with her hair all damp and shiny, with billowing fabric just flowing off her body like she’s in a perfume ad _what the fuck._ She says, “I feel terrible! But you know — I threw up a lot this morning. And I didn’t get glutened last night even though I was so drunk and just shoving food into my face. Grey! Do you know what a _miracle_ that is?”

“No, I don’t,” he mutters.

“It’s a real miracle!” she decrees. And, high on her victory, she decides to push her luck. She feels like she can eat anything! Obviously not gluten — but anything else! She says, “Wanna go grab breakfast?”

And because he is feeling just terrible, he rejects her. He’s not even that delicate about it. He says, “I’m not really hungry right now. Can you just drive me home?”

 

 

  
He figures that she must have Saturday plans and his parents are busy-bodies, so he tries to get Missandei to drop him off and just go the fuck away. He actually isn’t that aggressive to her because that’s just mean and it would probably hurt her feelings. He actually just suggests to her that she doesn’t have to pull all the way up to the house. But she tells him that that it’s totally fine and she can give him door-to-door service! And he is like, what the fuck? Is that a fucking joke about the loss of his dick? And then he tells himself to get the fuck over himself. Not every-fucking-thing is about his absent dick.

Her brightness is just killing him right now — it’s just degrading his soul — so he just grits his teeth and shuts his eyes and turns up the music so she can’t talk to him anymore — just as they arrive at his parents’ house.

In the driveway, he feels her touch him. She takes his head into her hands and twists it so it he is facing her. She looks really fresh and clean — she smells good, too. She can probably feel the blood throbbing in his skull because she says, “Oh my God, you are so hot. Like — your face is so hot.”

 

 

  
Now, it’s his turn to puke his guts out into a toilet. He rushes past his dad — who is only wearing a ratty robe and boxer shorts — and Grey slaps up the toilet seat in the bathroom before he unleashes the contents of his stomach into the bowl.

He hears his dad go, “Holy fuck.”

 

 

  
Missandei is still there — she’s hanging out on his parents’ sofa when he weakly exits the bathroom. There is a plate of untouched blueberry muffins in front of her on the coffee table, and he realizes that his mom tried to force food onto her. He has figured out that he probably has food poisoning because he ate fried chicken with truffled ketchup that bougie hipsters made for dinner. So this is probably what he deserves for that mistake.

When his dad, who has closed up his robe — thank God — too-loudly asks him if he’s still drunk as a skunk — because his dad thinks he’s just hungover and that poor, beautiful Missandei has to put up with him and be his champion — Grey crankily says, “I ate shitty chicken made by white people, okay! I am not drunk!”

“Son,” his dad says, recoiling a little bit. “Simmer down. I was just joking.” Then his dad sighs, holds out his hands, and says, “Come here.” And as he walks towards his dad holding out his own arms, his dad says, “Christ, Grey, I’m not trying to hug you. I’m trying to get a look at you and check your temperature.”

On the couch, Missandei spontaneously laughs. Her laugh is a womanly titter — like a fucking jackhammer in Grey’s head.

“See?” his dad says, lightly touching his fingers into Grey’s neck. “She thinks I’m funny.”

 

 

  
After his dad lifts his hands off Grey’s hot face and announces that he has no fucking clue what is wrong with Grey — other than the normal stuff wrong with Grey — his mom comes back into the room and shoves a glass of water at him. His dad says, “You probably just ate something with infectious organisms in it.”

His dad is still trying to be funny because he’s so excited he has an audience — that he has someone new that isn’t Grey or his mom to listen to his fucking jokes. His dad grins at Missandei.

He sees her smile back at his dad. Gross.

To break up the party, Grey tiredly says to her, “Sorry, but I just gotta go lie down. Sorry. See you later.” He means that he’s sorry he’s being such a punk — and also that he’s sorry he can’t get breakfast with her. He’s also sorry that his mom tried to poison her with muffins.

“Oh, don’t go yet,” his mom says to Missandei. “You just got here.”

“She literally has no reason to stay, Ma!” Grey shouts — just snapping because his parents are just driving him _nuts_ with how they are fucking staring at this woman like they think this woman is going to be his fucking savior. “You can’t just trap people here, you know!”

“Whoa, you check your tone, Nudho,” his dad says, voice hardening. “You don’t _ever_ talk to your mom like that.”

He sighs. He feels like he might start expelling diarrhea at some point in the near future. This is shaking out to be a really terrible Saturday. He miserably says, “Sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to snap. I’m just — I just feel like shit.”

 

 

  
He says bye to Missandei again — like, for real this time. He really needs to go lie down. He waves her off and she stands up, all uncertain. She stands up and she just stares at him — and he’s thinking, oh great, this shit again.

She actually wants to hug him goodbye — because he was just so awesome and nice to her — because he got her home and took care of her and made sure she was safe. She wants to advance along, mental-health-wise. She wants to be more comfortable around him. She’s actually been _trying_ to instigate a hug with him all morning. She tried to make herself hug him at her front door, but then she looked at his face — he was grimacing — and she got all scared. She tried to hug him again in the car, when they got to his folks’ place — but at the last moment, she just completely freaked out and put her hands on his face instead, like a complete weirdo. She was shocked to feel how hot his temperature is. She feels really bad for that. She knows that being sick is terrible.

Now, she wants to hug him bye because she thinks they are like, friends now. He’s been making fun of her and teasing her and talking to her like how he talks with his other friends — like how he talks to Drogo sometimes. It’s like — it’s legit now. They are kind of legit now. And she doesn’t have many male friends — so this feels momentous. So she wants to mark the occasion by opening up their relationship to hugging.

There is a lengthy pause as nothing happens because she’s _doing nothing._ His parents are staring. And Grey looks just helplessly stunned.

He blinks himself out of it. He says, “Yeah, okay,” as he turns around and stumbles away — as he stops himself from saying goodbye to her for the fucking millionth time because she can’t take a hint or explicitness. It’s not like he can tell her to just get the fuck out. That’s just rude.

He finds his room, and he crashes into his bed.

 

 

  
At some point during his feverish and restless nap, his mom comes into the room to take off his clothes and to wipe some of the sweat off of him with a cold washcloth. He is not super awake for it — but he realizes it is happening and he tries to help her. He tries to push himself into sitting up as she unbuttons his shirt and murmurs sentences at him that he cannot understand because his brain is so cloudy. He holds up his arms — gets this flash of his childhood — as she unbuttons his cuffs.

He groans as she pulls off his pants. She presses her cool hand on his chest after she’s done and then she leans down to squeeze his sweaty body in a hug.

She tells him she loves him. He mutters the same at her. Her tone is light with humor, as she tells him that his dad thinks that he accidentally ate poop or something — maybe that is why he is so sick.

And then she forces him to drink an entire glass of orange juice even though he doesn’t want to because orange juice tastes metallic combined with the bile trying to climb up his throat. She ignores his protests and just tilts the glass back. He has to drink it — and fast, too — otherwise he is just getting waterboarded by his mother.

 

 

  
By one in the afternoon, he feels a lot better. His bed creaks as he pushes himself out of it — as his stomach grumbles from lack of food. He walks out of his bedroom as he is — just in his underwear — and heads toward the kitchen for some fucking water or something.

When he spots her — sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of opened photo albums splayed in front of her — staring at him and his fucking body — he is like, “Oh my God, you’re still here!”

From behind him, coming out of the bathroom, his dad, now fully dressed, says, “Seriously, son. Today, I am glad you never became a doctor. Because I think your bedside manner would’ve been just fucking terrible.”

 

 

  
Missandei stares at him as he turns back around and heads back into his bedroom, to “put on some fucking clothes,” he says.

As he leaves, she’s blatantly staring at his smooth skin and his straight spine, his neat waist, the broadness of his shoulder blades, the muscles in his back — his butt — then his dad says, “I know what you’re thinking.”

He very likely probably doesn’t know what she is thinking.

Nevertheless, he says, “You’re wondering how he looks like that — given the dick thing.”

Oh wow. That is spot-on.

She looks at Grey’s dad. In total curiosity, she asks, “How?”

“You mean how do I know what you were thinking or how Grey looks like that with the dick thing?”

She flushes. She says, “The dick thing.”

“Oh, he still has his testicles,” Grey’s dad tells her — totally casually — totally conversationally like he is talking about the flowers in his garden. “Those are completely fine. His body still produces testosterone. The door just shut on his penis. Also, he went through some Androgen therapy because puberty was delayed for him — maybe because of the accident. So puberty had to be jump-started when he was fifteen. Just got some testosterone injections back then. After that — it was like, holy shit. He grew like a weed, and his body just completely changed. Girls started calling the house.” His dad chuckles. “I’d pick up the phone, hear a young girl on the other end, and would be like, ‘Oh, let me get Azzie’ — that’s his older brother. And the girl on the other end would be telling me no, she’s calling for Grey. And I was like, what! Are you fucking _serious?”_

“Oh my God,” Grey says, suddenly appearing in the kitchen again, wearing sweats. His arms are crossed over his chest. “I love this story. Thanks for always telling it, Dad. Where’s Mom?”

“At the grocery store buying shit for chicken soup because she coddles you too much,” his dad says, grinning at him.

“Oh, cool,” Grey drawls, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Did you remind her that I like potatoes in my soup? I don’t like my soup all watery. Did you also tell her to buy a stewing hen? The last time she made it with a roaster, it was like — what the fuck is this shit I am eating, _Mom?”_

“Oh, I can call her right now and give her your request?”

“Yeah, def. Catch her before she makes mistakes and poor decisions.”

They are actually both pushing this banter back and forth with the unstated goal of dispelling some of the awkwardness. They have both noted that Missandei cannot even look at Grey right now.

 

 

  
Missandei leaves — like for real this time because Grey ensures it. He watches her get into her car and drive off. They never hug. He never figures out that she wanted that from him. But then, she also dropped the idea from her brain like it was a hot, molten lava rock after she saw him with his clothes off.

He just salutes her tiredly and tells her he’ll see her later sometime. He tells her to have a nice rest of her weekend. He acknowledges that it was nice but way fucking weird of her for sticking around while he took a nap by being gracious about it — he thanks her for keeping his dad company. He tells her his dad sometimes gets crazy because it’s hard for his dad not to be working constantly. Grey tells her that she was really nice for spending time with his old man.

She softly tells him that his dad is so sweet, which really isn’t a word that he would used to describe his father, but whatever. She’s a terrible judge of character, whatever.

He is relieved when she finally peaces the fuck out. He re-enters the house and encounters his pops — because his dad is _everywhere._

His dad immediately says, “Okay, a few things. I see what you mean now — about her being insecure and afraid to voice a strong opinion. That girl definitely has some mental shit going on. I don’t mean she’s crazy. She seems pretty sane — but holy shit, sometimes it was like pulling teeth, having a conversation with her.” Grey starts to nod at his dad — starts to be like, see! But his dad raises up a hand to cut Grey’s victory lap short. His dad says, “But she’s not boring, son. And you are definitely attracted to her, you dirty liar. So that’s what I think.”

Grey blankly says, “Okay.”

“And she obviously likes you, too, idiot!” his dad snaps. “Otherwise, what kind of fucking psycho just hangs out in a house with old people for  _hours_ as you’re passed out in the other room? What kind of psycho flips through all of your baby pictures, all the while knowing that you got your penis lopped off?”

“And how did that topic of conversation even come up?” Grey asks. “Like, how did the conversation make its way to my genitals?”

“Organically,” his dad says vaguely.

 

 

  
At her next therapy session weeks later, Missandei finally gets a chance to talk about Grey, now that everything with her dad’s pension is worked out.

She tells Olenna that she thinks her thyroid medication has fully kicked in. She went on a snowboarding trip and didn’t like, die from exhaustion. She drank a crapton of alcohol not too long ago — and didn’t end up in a comatose state for a week. She was able to like, get up the next day and do stuff and everything!

She also feels attraction to someone. She cannot yet tell how sexual her attraction to this person is, but she’s just really excited to feel _something_ akin to a crush again.

When Olenna asks her if she plans on acting on her feelings — seeing where things could go with this person — Missandei urgently waves her hands in front of her body, like she is warding off the idea. She says, “Oh, no!” And then she kind of laughs.

When Olenna smirks in amusement and asks, “Why not?” Missandei finds she has to lay down so much _context._ Because it’s not a simple thing at all.

She tells Olenna that he has a physical abnormality — which would impede like, intimacy for them. And then Missandei hastily corrects herself. She says that she’s not saying that he couldn’t have sex ever — because of course he can. Everyone can. It’s just — she’s not the right person for someone like him to have sex with. Like, Yara would be a good person for him to have sex with — except Yara does not have sex with men — but that notwithstanding, the thing is that Yara is daring and adventurous and really confident in her body — so Yara probably does cool and original sex stuff all the time — like with toys and props and like — paraphernalia — and _stuff._

Missandei blushes as she tells Olenna that she’s not her friend Yara. She is just really repressed and uptight and scared and just very conventional and afraid and vanilla. She doesn’t want to go to a sex shop ever. She doesn’t want to buy stuff. She doesn’t want to put things on her body — or attach things to her body. She doesn't want to do any of this stuff with another person watching. If she were to have sex again — it would be in the dark and she would be tense and unable to relax the entire time. She knows her parents have messed with her brain in this respect.

Missy reminds Olenna that her sexual experience is just so limited and lackluster. She just isn’t equipped to have sex with someone like him. The two of them would be awkward and terrible together.

Besides, she doesn’t even know what the nature of her attraction to him is. She thinks that he’s really kind and really smart and really funny. She likes his personality a lot. She thinks he is handsome. She likes to look at him. She sometimes has an urge to hold his body in a hug and press her face into a safe part of his skin. She doesn’t think any of it translates to like, a carnal need to tear off his clothes and fall into bed with him. The idea of that is actually just fucking terrifying. What if she starts crying or freaking out or just becoming a really terrible person when she sees his injury? What if she just becomes another person who is horrible to him because of it?

She says, “Sometimes I wonder if my brain is making my heart feel this way about him — because my brain is still trying to protect my heart. Maybe I only have a small crush on this guy because he is completely inaccessible to me. Maybe I have a crush on him because it’s safe to crush on him, because it can’t actually go anywhere — it can’t ever like, be consummated. Maybe I have a crush on him because I’m still not actually allowing myself to be vulnerable.”

Olenna, who is now wildly curious about what kind of physical abnormality this man has, refrains from speaking on her curiosity. Instead, she leans hard on her training and her education. She says, “Missandei, you are jumping far, far ahead into the future and are already making decisions based on many things you actually don’t know. You don’t even know if your feelings are reciprocated by this man — so you actually don’t really have to worry about what intimacy would look like for the two of you right now. He’s not currently offering to be intimate with you, is what I’m saying. I want to remind you that this is your anxiety talking right now — this is your anxiety driving your brain right now.”

 

 

 

 

 


	11. Grey's brother is here!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey's brother comes for a visit and we see more family dynamics play out. Sex continues to be the specter that haunts over Grey and Missy's potential relationship, don't you just love it?!

 

 

 

When Yara shows up with a purple bruise on her chin and they ask what happened, she laughs happily and announces that Grey totally punched her in the face — on accident. Yara avoids elaborating beyond that — whether because she is sworn to secrecy or whether because she thinks it’s funny to be coy, Missy does not know.

Missandei, who hasn’t seen Grey in probably a month because they just haven’t run into each other, has like, _so many questions_ about this, chief among them is _how_ Yara and Grey became close enough to hang out by themselves and also exactly _when_ they joined a fight club and started punching each other in the face.

Missy doesn’t get to voice any of her questions because Irri is already getting a head start on the questions. Irri and Yara have made up — sort of. They are cordial, and they are politely friendly. In private though, Irri has told Missandei that it was hard to get over the idea that one of her best friends apparently just thinks so lowly of her. Irri has told Missandei she doesn’t quite understand why Yara feels so passionately about the whole Grey thing — why it became something that hurt their friendship so much.

Also in private, when Missandei tried to help smooth things over by being a liaison between the two of them — when Missy told Yara that Irri seems like she’s really missing Yara — Yara sarcastically said that she’s sorry that Irri feels bad about what happened. Yara feels bad, too. Like, it feels bad to learn that one of her closest friend is a bigot. Like, that’s rough.

That’s about the extent of Yara’s ability to forgive Irri. Unbeknownst to Yara, it completely gave Missandei the biggest fucking complex — this brand new fear. Now, Missandei is all worried that one day, Yara is also going to call _her_ a flaming bigot behind her back — and maybe to her face because that’s the kind of person Yara is — and it’s just going to hurt _like hell_. In a certain way, Missy can relate to how Irri is feeling. It is a complicated thing. But Yara acts like it’s so simple. But like Irri, Missy is also wondering _why_ she is a bigot just because she does not want to have sex with Grey. She actually doesn’t want to have sex with _anybody._ Doesn’t that matter?

“You guys are spending a lot of time together, huh?” Irri asks Yara, careful to keep her tone light and breezy. “That’s great! So he hit you in the face, huh? That’s funny!”

Missy almost smiles at that — at Irri’s commitment to keeping things happy.

“Yeah,” Yara says. “He had gloves on though, so he didn’t do as much damage as he could’ve.”

“Oh, that’s good! Did it hurt?”

“Yeah,” Yara says. “It actually hurt a lot. He felt really bad.”

“Oh! That’s a bummer. It looks like it’s healing nicely though!”

“Irri,” Yara says, dropping her voice into this don’t-give-a-fuck frankness. “I _get it._ We’re good. You can relax.”

 

 

  
In his new car, Grey does two revolutions around the airport before he sees his brother’s head, towering over a bunch of other weary travelers.

He rolls down the windows as he pops the trunk — as he slows down to a stop in a jarring jolt. He peeks out and sees his big brother’s hugeass smile. He calls out, “Yo!” And he has nothing snappy or clever to say. So he says, “Hi!”

His brother throws his duffle bag into Grey’s trunk and slams it before rushing into the car and collapsing into the passenger seat. They actually haven’t seen each other in person in about a year — Azzie was traveling around a lot and Grey was living on the other side of the continent — so it’s a little bit eerie and weird — for Grey at least — to be staring at his brother in the flesh, to be smelling the soap that his brother uses, to look at his brother’s face close up.

“Oh my God,” Azzie says in wonderment — probably processing through the same thing. “You look good!” he says, as he grasps Grey’s shoulders in his strong hands. “Let me get a look at you!” This is a recurring thing with his family members. He’s the youngest child. He was also really injured when he was little. Those two things have led his parents and his older brother to always examine him and his health. “Baby bro! You’ve been working out!” Azzie enthuses, before just pulling Grey to his chest and crushing Grey in a hug. “You need to eat more snacks though,” Azzie says, vigorously rubbing his brother’s entire back, feeling his spine, ribs, and shoulder blades.

And then he pauses. He says, “Are you listening to _Drake?”_

 

 

  
After more squealing, hugs, compliments on how good everyone looks, moderated statements about their dad’s health, photographic show and tells, and lots food — their parents sit Azzie down in the living room and catch up with him, talking about what he’s been doing, which family members he’s been seeing, what he thinks about life in the Isles — after a few hours of pleasantness, it all goes down the shitter because of course it does.

Grey has been living with their folks for months — so he is pretty much fully re-institutionalized now. Their dad’s random insults, and their dad’s inability to be delicate or subtle doesn’t rankle or register in Grey at all.

Azzie, however, finds it jarring — and also distasteful. Azzie is sensitive like their mother. Azzie doesn’t let anger and negativity roll off his back like Grey does. Azzie doesn’t roll with it when their dad asks him what his plans are. Their dad is being vague on purpose, because sometimes vagueness is the only way he can stop himself from going full-force judgemental.

It blows up in his face anyway. Azzie asks him what that’s supposed to mean. Their dad tells Azzie it means what it’s supposed to mean. It means what it means. Their dad asks Azzie what he’s got planned for the week — and in life. Azzie gets stiff, and he tells their dad that he’s living out his life’s plan. He’s doing it. He’s just experiencing everything.

Their dad’s mind is like, blown — even though their dad has literally heard this million of times before already. They repeatedly have this argument. Their dad says, “Dicking around on the beach isn’t living life. It is avoiding life.”

And like a million times before, Azzie is predictably like, “That’s _your_ definition. There are other ways to live that isn’t your way.”

And then shit totally gets nuts after that. Their dad and Azzie just start arguing and yelling at the table as their mom joins in like she doesn’t know that yelling on top of yelling doesn’t stop yelling. She is yelling that they are jerks, and it’s Azzie’s first night back — she is asking them why they can’t even get along for _one night._

They are unhearing. It stresses their mom out like it usually does. Grey is pretty cool with it — he’s used to it. He’s been hearing variations of this since birth, probably. He’s used to his dad’s rigidity. He’s used to Azzie’s rebellion. He’s used to speak up a little bit more, to earnestly try to mediate between the two of them. But his dad would always end up telling Grey to just shut up, and Azzie would always end up telling Grey to get his head out of their dad’s asshole for once in his life. So now Grey just chills and refrains from getting caught in the crossfire. He shoves in couscous into his face and breaks up chunks of stewed beef tips with his fork. He actually says, “Mom, this is so good,” in the middle of the fight. He says, “Are there raisins in this? Killer, Mom. I love this.”

Which makes his dad turn to him and go, “What the fuck! Are you autistic or something? Can you not hear that I’m having a conversation with your brother, and it’s not fucking about raisins right now?”

Azzie flinches. But Grey’s so used to and so good at being yelled at by their dad — for the most part. Grey says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize only you had the floor. Sorry. Carry on.”

Their dad is looking at him in shock. Their dad says, “Wow!” and even raises his hand — as if readying himself to smack Grey with it. And then their dad suddenly breaks out into a smile. Their dad laughs and reaches out and shoves Grey’s shoulder instead, jostling Grey off of his plate. Their dad says, “You’re such a twerp.”

Azzie watches this — and he suddenly remembers that yes, Grey is their dad’s favorite.

 

 

  
Things chill after dinner. Azzie watches as Grey clears the table with their mom, as Grey pulls on some rubber gloves and starts rinsing the dishes at the sink before popping them in the dishwasher. He watches as their dad settles into his armchair in the living room and flicks on the TV. Azzie drifts over to the sofa and settles down with a bowl of nuts and silently hangs out there for about fifteen minutes, after which Grey and their mom join him.

Azzie watches as Jeopardy comes on and their dad just starts answering all of the questions right. Azzie listens as Grey corrects their dad on some factoid like the nerd that his little bro is — and he watches as their dad snipes at Grey, but with a smile, always with a fond smile. Azzie watches as they bicker, as their mom works on her knitting beside them.

“Ah, shit,” Grey says, after their dad answers the tenth question in a row right, as another set of categories come up. “I hate the wordplay ones.”

“That’s because you’re too much of a literal thinker,” their dad immediately retorts, pushing deeper into his armchair.

 

 

  
Azzie is pulling his clothes out of his duffle bag in his old bedroom when he hears the tell-tale repetitive creaking sounds of bed springs — he even hears a heavy sigh, muffled through the wall. Shit.

He goes into his old closet and pulls out a jacket — a nylon black jacket he hasn’t worn in years. He shrugs into it before grabbing a cap and flipping it on his head, adjusting it once.

He enters his little brother’s room without knocking. Grey is lying in bed and reading a book. He immediately sits up when he sees Azzie, his expression questioning.

Azzie glances at the Grey’s closet — at all of the blazers, dress shirts, suit jackets, slacks, and the shiny leather shoes. Then he says, “Get up. We’re going out.” He picks up a pair of old Jordans. And then he chucks them at Grey’s chest. The unspoken decree is clear. Azzie is saying, wear that.

Grey is already picking at the laces, loosening them. He says, “Where we going?”

“I dunno, man. Just don’t feel like hanging out in my old bedroom listening to Mom and Dad have sex.” Azzie refrains from making a smart comment — a comment about how — Jesus fuck — what is this holy hell his little brother is living in, that he is back to being Mommy’s little man and he’s back to being Daddy’s little soldier — that he is not even fazed listening to their parents fuck in the other room.

 

 

  
Azzie stands in the room and makes his little brother change his clothes again — Azzie tells Grey to take off the cardigan that their mom bought him, holy shit. Grey warily looks at Azzie — generally not getting why Azzie is so agitated and being so fucking picky because Grey has done fucking nothing to his brother yet. All he has done is quietly exist, and it just seems to _bug_ Azzie. He pulls out a henley from his dresser and Azzie is like, “No, not that.”

And Grey sighs and is like, “Do you want to pick out my entire outfit for me, or what?”

Azzie says, “Oh my God, you’re a grownass man. Is this the conversation you have with Mom every morning before you start your day?”

Grey says, “Fuck you, man.” And then he pulls out a t-shirt. He resents this entire thing, but he still says, “Is this okay?”

“Yeah, wear that.”

Azzie has already texted some of his boys, told him he’s rolling through for a week. All of his boys told him to come through — there’s always room for him. However, rather than making Grey drive his ass around the Southeast in a Prius — they will definitely be doing that later in the week, just not tonight — he has Grey drive them to a club that he remembers has a DJ on Fridays.

 

 

  
Grey tries to tell Azzie about work — some of these stresses that he doesn’t talk to their parents about because their dad will just tell him to nut up and their mom will just tell him that all he can do is try his best. Grey finds that he is hitting another brick wall with his brother because Azzie straight up tells Grey that Azzie is not at all interested in Grey’s work shit.

The club is dark with walls stained with the smell of cigarette smoke even though it’s not legal to smoke indoors anymore. There’s no EDM and drunk white boys on Molly here. There is just a bunch of chill motherfuckers relaxing with their women and their boys, with drinks at tables as heavy bass rattles the walls and makes their pulses throb heavier.

Azzie is not really planning on putting in a heart-to-heart — not already at least. But after his fourth drink — Grey’s that is — Azzie, who is sober and who is nursing his second beer — says, “Baby brother, you know I love you. And I am worried about you.”

“What?” Grey says, frowning. “Why?”

“Mom and Dad are your best friends. You’re hanging out and watching Jeopardy with them on your Friday night. You sleep in the same twin bed you used to jack off in as a pre-teen. You’re dressing like Mr. Rogers. You drive a Prius. You say shit like, ‘On the contrary.’ You listen to Drake.”

“What’s wrong with Drake? Drake is great!”

“And you fuckin’ rhyming like a five-year-old,” Azzie says. “You’re under Dad’s thumb. I mean, you always have been because — you guys are your own thing. But Grey, it’s a lot. How long are you gonna live with Mom and Dad? Forever? I don’t know how you put up with it. I’ve been back for all of six hours, and I’m already going fucking _insane_ under this oppressive regime.”

“Yeah, Az,” Grey says in a deadpan, picking up his glass of Hennessy. “Dad getting on your balls about not finishing college is totally like Dad and Mom fleeing a military dictatorship.”

 

 

  
Azzie has Grey direct him to late-night dispensary because he hasn’t smoked weed in King’s Landing since it became legal to. As Grey lolls his head from side to side in the passenger seat — he is so wasted — Grey sardonically asks Azzie if Azzie remembers getting his ass beat when their dad realized how he able to afford his clothes and why he had two cell phones. Azzie laughingly says of course he remembers — his butt remembers the whupping like it was yesterday.

At the dispensary, the white guy with long brown hair behind the counter is like, “Hey, is he _drunk?”_ referring to Grey, who is swaying on his feet, giggling, and touching candy.

 _“Yeah,_ he’s drunk!” Azzie declares heatedly. “Is that a problem?”

The guy behind the counter shrinks a little bit. And then is like, “Oh, okay. Just wondering.”

And then, the three of them actually have a really nice conversation about strains and growing conditions and delivery methods. Azzie keeps saying, “No shit!” as the weed salesperson extols the virtues of vape pens. Azzie is amazed that technology has come so far. Azzie is also prejudiced and thinks pens are for scrawny pretentious hipsters — so for people like his little brother. And then he spontaneously reaches out and smacks Grey in the chest, making Grey cough. He says, “I’m joking! Don’t be sensitive!”

 

 

  
Azzie buys his little brother a weed lollipop because Grey wanted candy — and when Grey asked him to buy the candy, it was so fucking adorable and ridiculous that it made Azzie want to pee his pants laughing a little bit.

They are visiting all of their old haunts. They are at the Burgertown drive-in. There is that bowling alley casino just a block away that they used to frequent before Grey turned twenty-one and started being legally allowed to go into real casinos.

Grey has to hand over his half-finished lollipop to Azzie in order to free up his mouth to eat a double cheeseburger. Azzie has the stick of the lollipop tucked between his teeth as he tries to get enough streetlight to see the packaging of this disposable vape pen that he bought. Azzie tears apart the plastic and drops the trash into their burger bag before he does what the guy at the dispensary told him to do — he sucks. This e-pen is just powered by suction, it is crazy.

After a few puffs and some deliberation, Azzie has come to a conclusion. He says, “I don’t like it. It’s weird. It’s _cold.”_ He looks over at his brother, who is eating with both hands and his whole heart. He says, “Buddy, you want some more ketchup?” as he reaches out, grabs the little container, and dumps some more of it onto Grey’s fries.

After Grey finishes with a burp, Azzie hands over some napkins. And then after Grey finishes wiping his hands and face, Azzie hands the weed lollipop back over. He raises his phone to take a picture of his little brother. He mutters, “Well, I’m fucked. Dad is definitely going to kill me tomorrow. For sure.”

He’s in the middle of eating his own burger when a fucking cop car pulls into the drive-in, right in front of them — bright headlights and everything. Azzie is like, “Oh shit!” and automatically throws his vape pen into the bushes — forgetting that it’s legal — but still not legal to do in public. He also reaches out and rips Grey’s candy out of his mouth, throwing it randomly in the distance.

Grey groans, blocking his face from the headlights.

 

 

  
Azzie messily steps forward and shoves the cop in the shoulders, pushing the guy a step back. He says, “Mossy! You scared the shit out of me! Holy shit. My heart is beating so fast.”

Azzie’s cop friend is laughing. He takes his flashlight and briefly shines it in Grey and Azzie’s face, before laughing again. Azzie’s cop friend says, “Yeah, Johnny told me you were back in town. I was seriously just on my way home when I looked over and I was like — the hell! Is that Azzie! No way!”

“That’s so fucking hilarious! When you pulled up, I was like — oh shit, we about to die. But then I saw your ugly mug and I was like — oh! Just playin'! Hey, is that your gun?”

“Yeah, that’s my gun, man.”

“So crazy. I can’t believe you packing — like so legit now. Like, you law enforcement now, man. Like, you a cop!”

“I know, right?” Then, a light get shown into Grey’s face again — he shuts his eyes and tries to block it as Azzie’s cop friend says, “Is this baby boy?”

“Yeah.”

“With the thing — with the dick?”

“Yeaaah.”

“That fucking sucks, man,” Azzie’s cop friend says to Grey. “My condolences.”

“It’s okay,” Grey says. “It happened like, eighteen years ago. I’ve come to terms with it.”

“That’s good, man. You brave.”

“No,” Grey says. “You’re brave. You put your life on the line every day. For justice.”

Azzie’s cop friend laughs. To Azzie, he says, “Your bro’s funny.” To Grey, Azzie's cop friend is like, "Can you still get down with the ladies, man? Oh, I'm sorry — I assumed. Can you still get down with ladies or men or whoever you're into?"

Upon's Grey's blank and dazed look, Azzie clarifies and says, "He's asking you if you can have sex, Grey."

"Oh, I know," Grey says. "It's just a really personal question — and we just met."

"Oh, sorry man. Just curious."

"I get it," Grey says. "The answer to your question is that anyone can be intimate when they care about the person they're with."

"Well how 'bout that now," Azzie's cop friend says. "You're adorable, man. Like, I don't say that lightly. I don't typically say that to other men. Your brother was always going on about you back when — Azzie was always going on about how his little bro was so smart, so talented, so special — all that. Also about the dick thing."

 Azzie's laugh is rapid and repetitive, like machine gun fire.

"Yeah," Grey says. "People tend to be really interested in the dick thing. Which is a little invasive and dehumanizing sometimes. But it's okay!"

"So how do you actually fuck, man?" Azzie's cop friend asks. "Is just a lot of oral? Is it  _just_ oral? You peggin', man?"

 _"Whaaat,_ we just met and that's so _personalll,"_  Grey says softly, in a drunken sing-song, as Azzie cracks up again.

 

 

  
Azzie and his cop friend spend about fifteen minutes chatting in front of the drive-in — Azzie's cop friend goes to order a burger and a shake too — and they talk about all of their shared friends as he eats. Grey learns that they know each other because Azzie used to be the cop’s weed dealer. Azzie’s cop friend tells Grey that Azzie was like, the coolest fucking weed dealer ever — he just had to be friends with the guy.

Azzie asks the cop about the family. Azzie’s cop friend says the fam is great. Wife just got a promotion. Kids are little rascals — starting up school soon. Brother and sister are good. Brother is taking his sergeant’s exam soon. Parents are good — dad is real part-time now.

After Azzie’s cop friend finishes his burger and shake, he says, “Well, I gotta get going now — you guys need a ride somewhere?”

Azzie is like, “Oh, we’re good. We have his car right there.” Azzie is pointing to Grey’s Prius.

And then there is a slight pause. And then reluctantly, Azzie’s cop friend is like, “Ah, sorry, man. I can’t let you drive outta here.”

“What!”

“Man, you guys ain’t sober.”

 _“He’s_ not sober,” Azzie stresses, gesturing to Grey. _“I_ am sober.”

“Man, I saw you throw your drugs away right as I was pulling up.”

“What!” Azzie says, “It was weed! I was just vaping!”

Grey spontaneously starts laughing. Because the sound of his brother loudly arguing with a cop with, “I was just vaping!” is really hilarious.

“Yeah, man, I get it,” Azzie’s cop friend says. “I totally get it, man. But it’s the law, you know? As law enforcement, I really can’t let you just get in your car and drive home right now. Just let me drop you off somewhere. You guys can get your car tomorrow.”

Azzie sighs. “Oh, okay,” he says glumly. “Well, can you take us to our parents' house in the burbs?”

“Oh, the fucking burbs?” Azzie’s cop friend says incredulously. “That’s so far!”

 

 

  
Azzie shoves a sleepy Grey into the backseat of the squad car and buckles his little brother up before climbing into the passenger seat. Then he flips around to take a photo of Grey behind the metal divider. To Mossy, Azzie explains, “I’m taking photos for our parents. So that they can feel like they were living through this night with us, so that they can save it in the family photo album. This is their little baby, you know?”

“Yeah, I do know. My folks are also precious like that with my sister.”

 

 

 

 


	12. Missy is sick of everyone's shit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy experiences sexual harassment at work and it affects how she views herself and her friends. At Dany's nameday, Grey makes amends with Irri. Missandei meets Azzie who is like, his brother's polar opposite when it comes to expressing how he feels.

 

 

 

  
She accidentally sees the email thread when a message preview pops up on Carl’s computer after he leaves to grab printouts for them in the copy room. She normally would never poke around in someone’s computer, but she sees her name in message preview. The oft-suppressed impulsive part of her kind of springs to life at the way she sees her name articulated. Her hand touches his mouse, clicks on the message, pulls up Outlook. The first thing she reads — in italicized blue Times New Roman size 14 — is:

_I’d go balls deep in that ass._

Her hand start to tingle and her body goes on autopilot — her eyes are almost unseeing — as she scrolls down a little bit.

She sees a hand drawing of a woman who is probably supposed to be her. She is naked. She has huge boobs. She is being penetrated from behind in the anus by a disembodied penis. There is a word bubble that says, “Yes, daddy.”

She scrolls down further and sees tons and tons of emails responses going back and forth between her colleagues, discussing what it would be like to penetrate her.

Her heart is throbbing in her chest as she scrolls up — as she reads over who is on this email distribution list.

She leaves the email open on Carl’s computer. She’s not really thinking of doing it as a way of condemning him. She’s just not even thinking. Her heart just pounds as she shakily walks to the reception desk — as she goes past that and descends the stairs in her heels, with her hand grasping tightly onto the bannister. Her shoes click when she hits the floor, which is tiled. She walks around the corner to the restrooms. The bottom floor is vacant so there are not many people who use these toilets.

She slams open the door to the biggest stall. She locks the door behind her. She sits down on the toilet seat in her skirt, pulls out her phone, and she just stares at it.

 

 

  
The days that follow are intensely dissatisfying in intricate ways that are hard to enumerate. In the following days, everyone just _bothers_ her and nobody can say or do anything right at all.

It begins to slide downhill when she learns that Tyrion knew. He tells her that he didn’t know about that email thread specifically — because if he had known about it, he would’ve put a stop to it, of course he would’ve. She just stares at him blankly and without feeling as he confesses to her that sometimes he hears the stuff people say about her amongst themselves. Tyrion makes the fatal mistake of rationalizing it. He tells her that the industry is male-dominated. Tech is male-dominated. Games is male-dominated.

He’s so afraid of coming across like he condones it that he tells her that men are terrible, and men also talk like this. He kind of grasps at straws and he tries to appeal to the kind of power she has over men. He tells her that honestly, the fucking losers who wrote that stuff about her in their pathetic secret email chain would never have the fucking balls to say any of that stuff to her face. They are intimidated because she is so beautiful and those fucking losers don’t even stand a chance with someone like her in real life — and they know it, too. They are impotent and are going nowhere in life.

As she listens to Tyrion try to make her feel better — she just feels dead inside. She feels abstractly sad — like, a far-removed kind of sad. She feels sad because she thinks she’s losing respect for one of her really good friends. She wonders if they can even be friends after this. Out loud, she kind of corrects him. She says, “They also drew pictures.”

He says, “Sorry, hon?” because he doesn’t understand.

She reminds him. She says, “You said they wrote stuff in email. I’m saying that they also drew stuff.”

His forehead screws up in guilt and also in worry. He says, “Okay,” with uncertainty.

When she wearily tells Dany and Yara, the first thing Yara asks is if Missandei forwarded the email to herself — so that she has evidence of the bullshit that is going on. Missandei watches as Dany looks at her in curiosity, wondering the same exact thing.

Missandei tells them that she didn’t. She didn’t think to. She was just so shocked.

Yara frowns sympathetically. She says, “It’s okay!” with her voice upbeat and kind. Dany echoes that, too. Dany tells her that it’s okay, that they will figure this out together.

And it’s in that moment that Missandei understands how Yara and Dany see her. They see her as a species different from them. They would scorch the earth and burn the perpetrators to death. They would seek blood and reparations. They are talking to her like she is soft-willed, prone to rookie mistakes when it comes to responding to sexual harassment, just so delicate that she has to be handled with gloves in moments like this. Missandei realizes that everyone just fucking thinks she’s so _weak._

Tyrion gently suggests that she report what happened to HR. He tells her that he’ll support her in whatever she wants to do. She thinks it over.

She presents HR with a hypothetical. They generally understand what is going on — probably because in this industry, these kinds of things aren’t uncommon. They tell her that she has options. She can put in a formal complaint if she wants.

When she asks what the outcome of such a thing is, they tell her that they will look into the incident.

When she tells them that by this point, the email thread is probably wiped out of existence — based on how Carl and the rest of them have been acting around her — so what now?

They can’t give her enough answers. They can’t say anything that brings her any satisfaction.

When she tells Olenna about it — that’s when she cries about it. She has an easier time crying in therapy because of what happens in therapy. She talks about it for a few minutes — about how this entire thing is making her feel about herself — until she realizes she is just fucking over it. Olenna tries to guide her through it — but Missandei is just pissed and she resents the sense that everyone is giving her — that she should be working toward getting the fuck over this. She tells Olenna that she doesn’t really want to fucking talk about how disgusting pornographic drawings of her tie into her dad’s fucking slut-shaming during her childhood and her teenage years. She really does not need to fucking examine how this affects how she feels about her fucking body. She fucking feels awkward and scared in her fucking body. So what else is new?

She says, “It does not fucking matter. There’s no fucking point. Who even fucking cares?”

 

 

  
She intentionally and unintentionally starts to create space between herself and her friends. She takes longer to return their text messages. They are figuring out what to do with Dany’s nameday. They are having a difficult time picking Friday or Saturday. Missandei is not super engaged in the debate. Part of it is that she doesn’t like how life just goes on. Another part of it is that she resents making herself so accessible to people.

They settle on Friday.

She smiles back at Dany when Dany gives her this bone-crushing hug when she arrives at the restaurant with a present — it is a brainless choice, another bottle of Dany’s favorite perfume. Every hug is thick with context now. Dany is apologetic even though Dany doesn’t even know what she has done wrong. Dany just knows that Missy has been quiet and withdrawn and Missy is not happy.

Drogo presses her face into his chest by palming the back of her head, so she knows that he and his wife have definitely been talking about her behind her back. She generally ignores his kind eyes.

Over dinner, things sound like how they always sound. There’s eight of them for dinner — the rest are gonna meet them at the bar afterward. Drogo does some complaining about Grey’s absence — this is when Missandei kind of remembers Grey. She’s been too preoccupied to think about him much.

Drogo bitches to Yara and tells her that he doesn’t understand why Grey can’t take some time out to have dinner with his good friend on her nameday. Yara is not as bothered by the absence — she tells Drogo that it is Grey’s brother last day in town, and Grey doesn’t get to spend very much time with his brother. Dany tells Drogo that Grey said he’ll try to swing by later at the bar.

To the rest of them, this completely sounds like a reasonable reason and compromise for his absence, but Drogo is still really ticked off about it. Drogo tells them that Grey’s brother is a jackass.

Tyrion asks Drogo what the deal is — is Grey’s brother a thief? Is he abusive? Is he a compulsive liar? Is he mean and cruel?

When pressed to explain to the rest of them why Grey’s brother is such a bad guy, Drogo says really stupid-sounding things. Stuff like, one time when they were nine years old, Azzie embarrassed Drogo by pulling Drogo’s pants down in front of a girl that he liked. It’s stuff like, one time Azzie ate a sandwich and refused to give them a bite. Missandei listens to this bullshit, and she generally can’t remember why she was so intimidated by Drogo at one point — why she was so scared to look him in his handsome face.

When Grey shows up at the bar, she sees that he has brought his brother. She sees that they have the same coloring, but they look different. His brother is bigger and taller. His brother looks more like their mom, and Grey looks more like their dad.

Grey’s brother touches hands with Dany all gently and tenderly when he arrives, after picking out that she is lady of the hour. He says, “Hey, I’m sorry he wasn’t able to be here earlier. He wanted to be. We just got a little held up at my friend’s thing. It’s my bad. He’s my ride. I don’t have a car.”

Dany says, “Oh, no big deal,” as she grasps tightly onto his hands. “I’m so excited to meet you actually. I’ve heard a lot of things!” She does a not-too-subtle nod at Drogo.

“Ah,” Azzie says, turning to Drogo. He says, “Hey, little buddy!” as he holds his arms out for a hug. “How are you? Haven’t seen you in forever! Holy shit, you are _big._ I guess I can’t call you little buddy anymore!”

Drogo tries to avoid the hug, but it’s coming anyway. He frowns as Azzie encases him in an embrace. He flinches as Azzie kisses him on the cheek. He makes a big deal out of clawing his way out of Azzie’s arms. It looks ridiculous. It looks like he’s ten years old.

 

 

  
He spotted her, pretty much right away when he entered the joint. He thinks there’s no point in delaying what is inevitable. He walks up to her and he taps her on the shoulder to get her attention. He makes himself do it before he can think better of it. He says, “Hey, haven’t seen you in a while.”

Irri smiles at him. She spontaneously gives him a hug — which he was not expecting. She wraps her arms around him and her hair brushes his cheek as she squeezes his body. She says, “Hey! Oh my gosh, I’m actually _really_ glad to see you. It’s _really_ nice to see you. How are you?”

“I’m pretty good,” he says, now relaxing a bit.

 

 

  
She watches him as he flirts with Irri — and she kind of just allows her thoughts and her emotions to manifest how they will. She is surprised at how little this actually bothers her. She feels like she’s probably lived an entire lifetime since she has last seen him. She also has observed that he has not prioritized saying hello to her. She acknowledges that she is guilty of the same exact thing. She supposes that his slight means more because historically, he has done more work when it comes to the two of them interacting.

“Hey, can I buy you a drink?”

She starts. She jolts in her seat, and she reaches out to grab at the bar top. She hears a manly laugh. She feels a hand on her elbow as he steadies her. She looks up — into warm brown eyes that are smiling.

She kind of scoff-laughs and holds up her glass.

Grey’s brother peers into it. He tries to smell it. He asks, “What is this?”

“Club soda,” she admits.

“Ah,” he says. “Well, can I buy you another club soda?”

“Um . . .”

“Can I say something to you that is completely creepy, considering I’m a strange man, and you’re a woman who is just trying to enjoy her drink in peace?” he asks. And before waiting for her to answer, he says, “You are so stunning.”

 

 

  
He quickly learns that she is friends with his little brother. He looks at her face and he tells her that she looks familiar — gorgeous and familiar. He tells her that a lot of women in the Summer Isles have the vibe that she does. He tells her that when he saw her — his heart ached. He tells her that’s not a pick-up line. His heart ached because she makes him remember home. That was actually the reason why he came over to meet her. He tells her that she does not look like she is from here — if she knows what that means.

She tells him that she actually does know what he means — she says it warily and without looking him in the eye. She says it a little distrustfully. She admits that she is from Naath. She tells him that they are neighbors.

He says, “No shit! I have friends from Naath! That’s cool.”

He asks her about Naath, when the last time she visited was. He asks her about what she remembers of it, what it looks like. She starts to loosen up a little bit, incrementally. They start to exchange memories and observations. She asks him questions about the Summer Isles that he finds surprising.

He asks her, “Grey’s never told you about the Isles?”

She responds with, “Oh, um, I don’t think so? We haven’t talked about . . . you know, back home.” She refrains from telling him that she and Grey actually don’t talk much, period.

He takes the information in stride. He tells her that the Isles are really, really beautiful, of course. But that’s not the draw. The draw is the people. They are some of the most generous, some of the kindest people he’s ever known. He asks her if she knows what he’s talking about.

She softly tells him that she does know what he is talking about. She’s actually getting misty-eyed — and she sheepishly picks up her cocktail napkin to discreetly pat it against her lashes. She laughs self-consciously — she tells him that she got randomly emotional for a second there because she was just thinking that it’s so remarkable how people live through _real_ tragedy, not this stuff that they comfortably contend with here in King’s Landing. At home, it is life and it is death. But people there dare to have the hope to rebuild. She tells him that she thinks that’s amazing. It is humbling to just imagine the kind of bravery and optimism people are capable of.

He tells her that people rebuild and they also manage to be some of the happiest people he’s ever met. He tells her that all of the _stuff_ that they have here — the jobs, the houses, the cars, the _stuff_ — Summer Islanders have none of it. Yet, they manage to find happiness. He tells her that’s why he can’t wait to go back home. He also tells her that he thinks she is charming as fuck.

The bluntness makes her blink at him. He thinks it’s cute and that she is beautiful. He quickly asks, “Are you seeing someone? Do you have a boyfriend?”

Her face is so hot. She feels incredibly put on the spot. Her neck is sweating. She says, “Uh,” as she feels herself metaphorically choking.

He kind of saves her from answering. He smiles into the bar top, and he gently nudges her with his shoulder. He reminds her, “I’m asking for a friend. Remember, I’m going home tomorrow?” He says, “My little brother is single, you know. I don’t know how well you guys know each other, probably not that well, but you should know that he is _awesome.”_

 

 

  
Drogo has only three beers in him — because it’s his wife’s party, not his — so he’s pretty sober as he watches Azzie hit on Missandei. Dany was actually the one who called his attention to this fucking shit. Dany was the one who leaned over, whispered to him, and told him to check out what is happening at the bar. She nuzzled his neck and placed a kiss on it as she told him that it’s so cute — the look of Missandei chatting with Azzie is so cute.

Uh, no it’s fucking _not._ He _disagrees._

This shit is just _bothering him,_ so he gets up and he walks over to them to break this shit up. He walks over there, and he says, “Hey, is he bothering you, Missy?”

Azzie wordlessly looks at Drogo for a long second. He generally sees that shit has not changed at all. He says, “Hey, Drogo. Will you bring it down a few levels? We’re just talking.”

“I was asking her,” Drogo says heatedly. “I wasn’t talking to _you.”_

“Drogo,” Missandei says gently, laying a hand on his forearm. “Everything is fine.”

“What is your plan here, man?” Azzie says. “What is the point of this? Aren’t you married? Why you jealous and possessive of a woman who isn’t your wife, bro?”

“You are so fucking _off-base —”_

“You don’t know _nothing,_ man.”

“You don’t know _nothing!”_

 _“Okay,”_ Grey says, suddenly breaking in between them with his arm and body, having spotted the escalation of this from across the room. He glances at her — just for a quick moment — and then he is holding onto Drogo because Drogo is generally the one that needs to be watched carefully in moments like these. He body checks Drogo and gets him to take a step back. He says, “Okay, we’re _done_ with this. Come on. Turn around. Walk _away.”_

 

 

  
Azzie finishes his drink kind of pensively, sitting in the stool next to her. He doesn’t say much. His mood has tanked and he’s tired now. He’s tired of navigating his dad all week. He’s exhausted from putting in so much face-time with his friends. He finds that things just move so fast here — pointlessly — like people find self-importance in being distracted. He finds that his brother is still completely mired in the same old shit — same shit with the folks, same codependent shit with Drogo. Drogo will forever always be the guilt-ridden kid who constantly hangs around the house because he feels like his devotion can make Grey’s dick grow back. Drogo is still the kid that feels a deep responsibility to teach Grey about the ways of the world even though no one gave him that fucking job — and if that job belonged to anyone, it was Azzie’s. Drogo is still out to prove that Grey is normal through stupidly destructive ways. Drogo is still the idiot that gave alcohol and drugs to Azzie’s little brother and pushed him into sexual experiences he was not at all ready for — to teach his little brother what masculinity is all about — even though that wasn’t his fucking job at all. So, that’s nice. That they are still so close.

“Hey,” she says quietly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, softening his face for her benefit. “I’m just really frustrated right now.” He generally doesn’t lie about his feelings ever. He has seen what it has done to their father. So he doesn’t hide from his feelings.

 

 

  
Grey shrugs into his jacket before he goes around the room, giving out free hugs and stopping himself from apologizing for his brother — or Drogo. He hugs Dany and wishes her a good rest of the night. He hugs Yara and tells her he’ll see her next Tuesday. He hugs Tyrion and says bye. He hugs Obara and says bye. He hugs Jhiqui, this woman that he seriously just met two hours ago. He hugs Irri and tells her it was great to see her. He hugs Drogo and ominously tells Drogo that they will talk later. He saves Missandei for last on purpose — because she’s furthest from center of the room — and also because he’s been inexplicably dreading seeing her.

She’s standing next to Azzie. Grey hadn’t seen her in over a month — and when he saw her again, the sight of her made his pulse jump. So. That is terrible. Beautiful women are fucking terrible for him. He had to remind himself that she is boring as fuck and has no opinions in life and stuff.

He says, “Hey, sorry — we’ve barely like, talked tonight. Bummer that I’m saying hi — and then bye.”

She says, “It’s okay,” with this hopeful smile turned up at him.

He’s like, okay, this shit has got to stop, as he opens his arms in resignation and reaches out to touch her. He pulls her into him, and he does all of the routine hugging things. He holds her body against his and he squeezes her as she squeezes him back. It just generally feels so amazing and she smells so good, so that’s fucking bullshit.

Then he lets her go and transfers her over to his brother. He watches as they hug and chat and talk about keeping in touch _what the fuck?_ He patiently stands there and waits this out.

Azzie says, “Get my contact info from Grey. And totally come visit me in the Summer Isles one of these days — any time. I’ll show you guys around. It will be so fucking _wild.”_

She shyly says, “Maybe,” in that polite way that means she is not planning on taking him up on this whatsoever. She also shyly says, “I actually don’t have Grey’s contact info either.”

Grey says, “Oh what? Seriously?” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his phone.

She softly says, “Yeah. We’ve only corresponded through Drogo or Dany. I mean, electronically. I mean — obviously we’ve corresponded in person directly. I mean, not corresponded. Like, we’re not writing letters to each other while we’re in the same room with each other. I mean, we’ve talked in person. Verbally.”

“Missandei,” Grey says, his face utterly serious. “Thank you so much for all of the clarifications.” Then he says, “Okay, I’m ready to punch in your number. What is it?”

 

 

 

 

 


	13. Grey and Missy go out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because so many people in Grey's life have told him he should open up his mind and take the future love of his life out to dinner, he decides to listen to them. It turns out to be a terrible idea because the future love of his life is such a nut about having dinner with him.

 

 

 

  
She doesn’t consult with anyone and she doesn’t expect much of an outcome after she reports the incident. She expects the system to fail her. She expects HR to protect the company. She expects for her colleagues to ostracize her. She expects her bosses to tell her that it was all in her head and to not take joking colleagues so seriously. She expects men to tell her to learn how to take a compliment. She expects women to tell her that they all deal with this way more elegantly and efficiently than she does. She expects to be let down because her dad progressively became more and more jaded in his career as he aged along with it. She holds these stories in her head about the terrible things that people can do to one another — over nothing. She remembers these stories about how there is no real justice.

So it is a surprise to her when fourteen men at her company get terminated. It happens swiftly. She expected this to be dragged out for months, but it happens in about a week. She vaguely gets told that it wasn’t hard to unearth the email thread. It was forwarded to HR by an employee.

People who don’t know her furtively start staring at her at work. Women she doesn’t know come up to start conversations with her. Sometimes they address the incident and tell her how fucking awful it is. Sometimes they skirt around it and give her compliments bracketed by meaningful pauses. No one is overtly a jerk to her. The company is being careful about retaliation. Sometimes she reads things in the staring — but that is really the worst of it. 

She still feels numb. She’s not under the illusion that the company cares about her as much as the company just wants to protect itself. But her boss suggests she take a few personal days to herself, and she does.

Things are different with Tyrion now. The way they behave with each other is purely professional. The sex jokes have dried up and died. He sometimes looks at her with such regret, and she’s not really in the mood to shoulder his guilt. When he apologizes for not standing up for her when he had the opportunity to, she honestly tells him that it’s okay because she didn’t expect him to. She actually doesn’t have an expectation that people will stand up for her.

He says, “I just want things to go back to normal.” He means that he wants for things to be easy between them again.

But she takes it to mean something else — something _more._ She feels like he doesn’t realize what he is saying. He is saying that he wants things to go back to when she was ignorant and unaware of what was being said about her behind her back. She says, “I don’t.”

 

 

  
When Grey texts her for the first time ever, it’s to give her his brother’s contact information. He’s rather comprehensive about it, giving her his brother’s phone number, his brother’s email address, his brother’s home address even. She cannot tell if he’s trying to convey something to her or if he’s just a very thorough person. She still does not know this person very well, so her infatuation with him is basically a house of cards that can crash down at any moment. Maybe she will discover that he pronounces height as heighth and upon learning that, the pitter patter she current feels in her chest for him will fucking die a swift death, and she will get some _relief_ from this finally.

She responds to his text message with a hello and a thank you. She asks him what he’s currently up to.

 

 

  
When he first came back, he had to contend with the annoyance of finding a new doctor in King’s Landing. He really liked his old doctor. He also generally refuses to get a recommendation from his dad because his dad already had a long run of picking all of Grey’s doctors, from birth through puberty. His dad generally never treated Grey or any other family member because — as his dad readily admits and constantly proves through action — doctors have a hard time being objective with their loved ones.

Grey tried to exert his independence in small ways when he was younger, such as in choosing his own GP. His dad will always recommend a former colleague, and all of his dad’s colleagues are generally old men and women. He and his dad had an argument about this once — his dad sarcastically said to him that yes, it must be a hardship to get directed to a pool of non-idiots who are really great at their jobs and know what they are doing — and yes, it makes sense to just pick a name out the internet’s phonebook based on Yelp reviews and just hope for the best.

Grey finds that his dad invariably ends being at least a little bit right — almost all the time. A private lesson was learned when the first doctor he picked on his own didn’t really read his chart closely enough the first time — and _did_ assume he was trans. Grey’s soft correction of the doctor felt embarrassing — he was probably eighteen years old and still just deeply ashamed and self-conscious about his body. It was crushing to have a medical professional be so wrong about him — to have a medical professional that has his health in their hands just not understand him at all. He was worried that his dad was right and he did pick an idiot from the internet’s phonebook and he was going to like, get some sort of infection and die because he chose a doctor who wasn’t good at his job, who didn’t realize that Grey totally doesn’t have a vagina?

“Everything looks great,” his current doctor, Dr. Tarly, says cheerfully, pulling off his glove. Dr. Tarly is probably someone that Grey’s dad would say is still way too fucking young to be really good at his job.

Grey says, “Awesome,” because he’s not sure what else to say after getting a finger pushed up his butt and getting told that everything is just great.

Dr. Tarly nods at the MA and says, “We’re going to leave the room now so you can get dressed. And then you and I will chat when I get back?”

“Sure,” Grey says.

Grey gets dressed pretty fast. It’s one of his paranoid fears, that someone will walk in on him while he’s in the buff. He doesn’t know why he’s afraid of this because doctors seriously take forever and a half to come back once they leave a room. But he throws his clothes back on his body in record time anyway. He leaves the dressing gown on the exam table.

And then he waits.

When Dr. Tarly finally makes an appearance again, it’s to go over Grey’s medications. It’s all mundane and routine. He tells Dr. Tarly he barely uses the Xanax because his anxiety has been pretty alright. He barely uses the Ambien because he’s been getting to sleep just fine. He still takes his Zoloft on the daily, and that seems to be fine. He does not need painkillers because he hasn’t felt pain in years — knock on wood.

Dr. Tarly asks Grey how urination is going. Everything okay and working as expected there?

Grey tells Dr. Tarly that peeing is fine.

Dr. Tarly asks if Grey currently has a sex partner — is the Zoloft impeding sexual function? Can he still ejaculate?

Grey is tempted to crack a joke about how it’s his genitals that really impede his sexual function — but he doesn’t really know Dr. Tarly that well so they don’t have a snazzy rapport yet. Grey answers straightforwardly. He says he does not have a sex partner currently. The Zoloft is just the same as always. He’s been on it for so long that he doesn’t really remember life without it. He says, “As far as I can tell, things seem normal? I am still able to ejaculate if I concentrate hard.”

Dr. Tarly says, “Okay, good. I’m not sure you’re supposed to need to concentrate hard, but as long as it’s working for you, then it’s fine. Decreased libido generally works well for people when they don’t have a partner, but if that changes for you and you find that the medication is causing some issues, let me know. We can adjust.”

“Super.”

 

 

  
They kind of start texting back and forth a little bit over the week. She sends a picture of her new manicure to him when he finally responds back half a day later to vaguely tell her that he’s just in the middle of some boringass bullshit. She doesn’t realize that he has a habit of talking about his job very broadly, both because of the security issues involved with his job but also because he doesn’t think people find his job interesting. She takes in his mildly aggressive response and she files it away in her head, another thing to add to her growing sense of him as a person.

She sends him a picture of her nails when he reciprocates the inquiry and asks her what she is doing. When he sees the nail station underneath her hand, he makes a joke about her life of leisure — about how it must be nice to just get pampered in the middle of the work day.

She takes in more of this information about him — his joking sarcasm when he thinks she’s just doing nothing for the sake of doing nothing. She feels judged. She feels like she has to correct him. She’s _not_ a person that just gets her nails done in the middle of the day for no reason. With one free hand typing, she tells him she’s actually not working. She has the day off.

He asks her if she’s just using up extra vacation time or if she’s playing hooky.

She tells him that she’s taking a mental health day, probably.

He asks: _Why?_

She learns that he is not very delicate in how he thinks and how he asks. She finds that the entire story of the email thing at work is just too long and too daunting to tell. She tends to assume that she is boring and her life is boring. She tends to be bad at talking about herself. She does find his bluntness to be interesting — disorienting, sometimes a little hurtful, sometimes a bit aspirational — and definitely interesting. So she texts him back and tells him that she was given some time off because some of her ex-coworkers talked about her behind her back in a sexually explicit way. They were all fired. She is being given time off so that she doesn’t try to sue the company. Probably.

There is a bit of a pause after that — both because he has stopped responding quickly, and also because her nails are proclaimed fully dry and she has to pay her bill.

When she gets back in her car, her phone buzzes. She looks at it. He’s asking:

_Are you okay?_

 

 

  
She shows up to the restaurant early — because she literally has nothing else to do besides fixate on every tiny thing and make up stories that end with the complete and utter devastation of her heart — like, three years from now. Her internal narrative is a lot of what ifs. What if she says the wrong thing? What if he learns about her and he decides that she is just another empty vessel, just a pretty face with nothing inside? He would be wrong, but it doesn’t matter because many people tend to have this belief about her. What if it goes really right and they have a wonderful night and then he tries to kiss her and she ends up sobbing against his mouth because she is so scared to hurt his feelings and tell him that she just wants to be friends with him? She can’t tell him that she doesn’t feel more than friendship for him, because it would be a lie. But she also can’t tell him that she cannot imagine doing anything sexual with him because his body — or the thought of his body — kind of freaks her out. She wonders if she wants to be a mom and get married and have children — and if she does — maybe he’s not the person for her and they’d just waste their time with one another for something that is doomed to fail.

She’s in the middle of closing her eyes and muttering, “Oh my God, shut up, you crazy bitch,” when he arrives. She’s sitting right next to the door, so there’s a draft and then he is there.

He’s looking at her questioning. She’s staring back him, stunned.

And then he recovers and he cautiously says, “Are you . . . talking to the voices in your head?”

 

 

  
Most of dinner is pretty awkward because they revert — or _she_ reverts. She’s not the person that he’s been texting with. She’s the person that he interacted with on the ski trip.

He recalls his dad’s stupid advice, and he forces himself to ask her questions about herself, to give her opportunities to talk about herself. He asks her about her day, about what she wants to eat, if she likes pork or not, if she has eaten at this soup shop before. She answers in single syllables and can’t look him in the face. And it frustrates him. He tries not to take it out on her. He tries to maintain a smooth and pleasant tone. He works overtime to ramble, so that space gets filled up. He randomly tells her about how he’s not super hungry because he had a big lunch with a guy named Anthony. Anthony is his work pal and they like this place around the corner from their office that makes just humongous burritos.

He wants to just kill himself already because he hates this story as he’s in the middle of telling it. But he keeps telling it, with embellishment.

Like her — he is trying to enact some positive changes in his life. His family members — the people who are closest to him in the entire world — keep subtly intimating that he might have dipped into the bad side of depressed. He doesn’t think he has, but then, people in the middle of the cloud can’t see straight. He just knows that his mom and dad keeps pushing him to socialize, because even _they_ think it’s weird that he hangs out with them so much. His brother has given him multiple emotional talks about how he is worried — about how nothing in Grey’s life changes. His brother expressed fear that life is just passing him by because he’s too afraid to live it.

When he called up Irri and asked her out, it was sort of with optimism. And also the expectation that she’d run the fuck away once she knew the truth about him.

When he suggested to Missandei that they grab dinner, he told himself that she already knows the truth about him. And she’s still going to run the fuck away.

He still asked her anyway — because a belief that he has about himself is that he is afraid of _nothing._ He is afraid of _no one_. He does not give a shit — though maybe that is becoming a problem, the lack of shits that he gives.

He told himself that if there is something that kind of does stir up anxiety and fear — it’s her and what she can do to him.

This is why he asked this punk to dinner. He believes in meeting fear head-on, staring it right in the face, taking away its power.

He cuts his story about how the burrito tastes short. He kind of impulsively raps his knuckles on the table between them. He says, “Hey,” to get her full attention. “Can I just ask you something, straight up? Why can’t you look me in the face? Am I doing something to make you uncomfortable? Are you worried I’m going to like, _do_ something weird or offensive in front of you? Is it the dick thing?”

 

 

  
When called upon to answer why she can’t look him in the face, it’s such a smack in the brain that she is disoriented and just bewildered and fearful. She immediately becomes self-protective, which means she lies. She lies a _lot._ And badly.

She tells him she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as she forces herself to look him in his eyes. She tells him that she _does_ look him in the face. She doesn’t have a problem with this at all. She tells him she doesn’t even know where he got this idea. She has no problem with him whatsoever. He’s fine. He’s nice.

He completely hates that she is lying to him and that he is watching her be such a coward over a series of questions that aren’t even that terrible or difficult. He is like, “Okay,” and holds in a sigh. He can’t hold in the anger, though. He can’t hold in how pissed he is that he is just fucking wasting his time on this bullshit. He fully disengages for a while after that — as he regains his bearings. He just eats his noodle soup quietly. It is rice noodle soup and it is gluten-free and he looked up and researched this shit for her. He even called the restaurant and shook them down with a bunch of questions during their lunch rush — for her. It is so fucking annoying. This entire thing is.

She basically wants to cry in the five minutes that he is pissed at her. She full on stops eating and just sits there, staring miserably at the soup, mentally beating herself up for being such a fucking loser. She shouldn’t have agreed to this. She should’ve known that this would go badly. She should’ve just stayed home curled up in bed with a book.

After five minutes, he sighs. Then he says, “Hey, I’m sorry — for getting mad. Um, you said that I’m mistaken about the vibe between us, and so I’m gonna take you at your word. I’m mistaken. Let’s reset. Do you like the food?”

 

 

  
After they finish eating, they split the check, put on their light jackets, pull out their car keys, and start walking back to their vehicles. She learns they are parked in opposite directions. He is moving things along quickly — he picked up the check quickly and grabbed his keys quickly. He asks her, “Where are you parked? Do you want me to walk you to your car?”

 

 

As she grips her keys in her hand and hikes her purse higher on her shoulder, she just feels terrible. She feels shaken. She feels like she really fucked this up, and he’s never going to want to hang out with her ever again. It makes her very sad.

He says, “Okay, well, see you later,” as he reaches over to give her a quick one-armed side-hug and a quick pat on the shoulder. He completely lies to her and says, “I had a good time tonight.”

She says, “I had fun, too. We should do it again sometime.”

He shrugs. He says, “Sure.” He also says, “Text me when you get home?” And then he must realize what it sounds like — like, it sounds like he wants to engage in more conversation with her. He quickly clarifies so that she will _not_ think that. He says, “So I know you made it there in one piece. Just a quick ‘hey, I made it!’ will do it.”

“Oh, okay,” she says. “You, too. Let me know when you get home.”

“Definitely.”

“Bye.”

He gives her a smile as he’s walking backwards. He also gives her a shallow wave. He says, “See ya!”

 

 

  
When she gets into her car — after he is gone — she bangs her forehead on her steering wheel and releases a loud groan. She pulls out her phone and starts cobbling out this epic apologetic text about how it’s her fault that the night was so fucking awkward and she takes full responsibility for it all — but then she realizes that sending him this fucking text right as they leave each other would be _psycho_ — so she puts her phone away and kind of screams with her mouth shut, to muffle the noise.

 

 

 

 

 


	14. Grey goes on a ride-along

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chap, Grey breaks up with the other love of his life (Nooooooo!!!!) and then starts filling in the gap with new people and activities.

 

 

 

  
Azzie poisoned the water before he left, which is probably the reason why Grey and Drogo fight for the first time in probably . . . ever.

Grey agrees to meet Drogo for drinks after work after a cooling off period of about a week. They meet in between their offices at a pricey place downtown with high tables interspersed around leather armchairs. They both show up in suits and kind of laugh sheepishly over it — over how the passage of time is nuts. Grey rubs the back of his neck and he tells Drogo he had a meeting with upper management today — thus the suit. Drogo tells Grey quarterly earnings and commission reports are about to be widely distributed — and everyone is on edge because the numbers aren’t great.

There’s a frisson of anxiety between the two of them — a strange and foreign element to their friendship.

Before Azzie left, he told Grey that he thinks that Drogo is clearly a good and protective friend to Grey — but their friendship might be one of those sum-zero friendships, the kind of friends that are sustained on history alone. Drogo will always be the guy that busted Grey’s dick. And Grey will always be the guy who was maimed because of something Drogo did.

Azzie told Grey that the problem is that they always have to contend with history when it comes to old friends. Azzie told Grey people are obsessed with the past. But it does it even matter, being great at running fast and carrying a ball at seventeen years old? Azzie asked Grey how often their dad reminds Grey that he didn’t go to medical school.

Azzie also told Grey that people who are living in the Summer Isles have actually moved on from the past better than their father has.

In the car, driving the airport, Grey really resented all of the last minute lessons. Grey resented the surfer dude wisdom from a guy who fucking left and ran away when shit got hard and left his little brother to bear all of the responsibility that could’ve been split between two sons.

Grey looks up and thanks the server when she brings them their drinks. A beer is put down in front of Drogo. A negroni is put down in front of Grey. He reaches over his crossed legs, picks up a cocktail napkin, and places it in his hand before laying his drink over it. He pushes the flap of his suit jacket over his thigh before he takes a sip, as Drogo asks him what he’s been up to.

“On Sunday, I hung out with my folks and talked about maybe trying to brew beer with my dad,” Grey says. “He needs a hobby and he used to really enjoy helping me with my science projects — so I figured, hey, maybe we can try to do that again. Of course he’s not into the idea at all and calls me stupid and wasteful and said that beer is pretty cheap to buy, but ah, I dunno. I might just try to get a kit and see if he’s into it. And yesterday, I grabbed dinner with Missandei at that new soup shop place. Man, the food was aiight. I might go back there this week and try the dry noodles, which, I know, is hilarious because it’s a soup shop —”

“Wait,” Drogo says slowly. “You had dinner with Missy? Just the two of you? Alone?”

“Is that okay?” Grey asks, also slowly.

“Grey, that’s amazing. That’s so awesome, bud.”

“Why?” Grey asks, taking another sip from his glass. “It’s just dinner. You weren’t this excited the first time I grabbed pizza with Yara.” Grey pretty much already knows the reason why — he just kind of wants to hear it articulated.

“Missy is really cute,” Drogo enthuses, trying to keep it light. “Did you know that Missy was who I initially wanted to set you up with when you came back? But then I figured — Missy is so painfully shy, whereas Irri is really outgoing and seems more sexually adventurous, you know?”

“Um, no, I don’t know,” Grey says.

“I mean, there are stories about how Irri hooked up with a girl in college.”

“I’m not a girl though,” Grey says. “So I don’t understand how that info is relevant.”

“Grey, you’re being obtuse on purpose right now.”

 

 

  
Drogo feels like he was set up for failure here. He feels like Grey was itching to start something from the moment they got here. He feels like Grey came expecting to battle.

As the dread inside of him grows and grows, Drogo feels like he can’t say anything right — he can’t say anything that satisfies Grey right now. Grey keeps pressing on why it even matters that Irri is supposedly sexually adventurous, why it even matters that Missandei is cute but shy, why it matters that Yara is gay and seeing someone thus, not interested in him. Drogo keeps saying that of course these things aren’t the most important things — of course these things don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. He just wants Grey to be happy.

“You keep pushing these women on me,” Grey tells Drogo. “After I repeatedly asked you not to. I’ve told you that I’m not interested in being in a relationship. I’m not interested in a casual thing. I’m just not interested in dating anyone right now — but you just don’t listen. I have nothing in common with these women. I don’t like the pressure you’ve been putting on me —”

“I haven’t been putting pressure on you,” Drogo protests. “I just introduced you to my friends —”

“What the hell happened last weekend? Did you see my brother being nice to someone that you had reserved for me and you just get all pissed —”

“That’s a real bullshit interpretation.”

Grey is getting inordinately angry over this. He’s usually really chill and really cool about the things people say about his sexuality or the accident that resulted in him crying in pain for months. He’s pretty relaxed when people make assumptions about him. He is real cool when people express their pity for him, when they tell him that they are so sorry that he is such a broken person who will never be whole again. He is real cool when women tell him that he most certainly deserves love — but not with them, definitely not with them. He is real cool about all of it because of course he went through years of therapy. He had to have — it was basically a prerequisite for this kind of adulthood.

He’s not particularly ashamed of any of it. He’s had to work hard not to be. He’s had to work hard to be open and to share this aspect of himself with people instead of just trying to hide it for the entirety of his life. He sometimes even forgets that he is lacking — he forgets until people remind him.

“You keep acting like I need to be _fixed_ — with _sex,”_ Grey says flatly.

 

 

Grey starts to dip into the ugly side of depression like, for real. He realizes that everyone who loves him is fucking hysterical and he was actually really fucking _fine_ before his falling out with Drogo. After the falling out — then he is like, oh yeah! _This_ is what fucking depression _feels like._ He had forgotten. On account of being pretty fucking happy for a good while there.

When his dad finally asks him why his panties are in such a wad, he tells his dad that he and Drogo broke up. Or they are on a break. Or _something._ And his dad is like, all alarmed about it even though his dad does not like Drogo.

This is how they start brewing beer together. Grey comes home from work one day and finds a hugeass box from Amazon in the middle of the living room. His dad waited for him to get home to open it. His dad cautiously says, “I was thinking — maybe we can do this together?” And Grey is like, “Whatever, sure.”

His disengagement and lack of humor starts to just scare of the shit out of his parents. They have these terrible memories of him just holed up in his bedroom for days at a time when he could get away with it — during school breaks. They start suggesting to him that maybe he should take some vacation and visit his brother. They tell him that they’ll pay for his trip even.

He tells them, “Relax, guys. I’m not going to kill myself without giving you a heads up about it. Don’t worry.”

And _that_ is a joke. But they do not find it funny whatsoever.

It takes him about two weeks to start feeling better. The beer is still fermenting — it is not an extremely active hobby — so Grey decides to join a gym nearby his parents' house. He signs up for a membership because he wants access to the swimming pool and also the basketball courts. He gets naked, showers, and changes in the men’s locker room like he does not even give a shit — and that is because he does not even give a shit. As usual, all of his worst fears are unfounded. No one comments on it.

His skin is dry from all of the chlorine, so he and his mom go shopping. She fucking loves it. He is okay with it. He buys lotion for his dry-ass skin. She makes a really low-key masturbation joke about what he is really using that lotion for — and he is like, “Mom,” as he feels bad. He has forced his mom to resort to sex jokes to try to get him to smile.

He has other old friends here besides Drogo, so he starts calling them up. He calls up Kojja, for instance, and is like, “Hey, what’s up, man?” And Kojja is like, “Grey!”

He starts making new friends. Yara knows that he had a brutal thing with Drogo, and she is insensitive and also like, poignant about it. She tells Grey that his choppy-chop penis is just the fucking ruiner of lifelong friendships. She tells him that his stump-dick ruined her friendship with Irri. She sighs and says people like _them_ just don’t get it, aligning herself with him. She introduces him to some people — to Dagner and Ralf as well as Obara’s sisters.

She says, “I know some really beautiful cis and non-cisgender women I can set you up with. Interested?” And before he can explode at her, she says, “I’m kidding! Too soon?”

 

 

  
“You wanna cuff ‘em, man?” Moss asks Grey, grinning at him. It’s a joke — it’s actually probably not legal for him, a citizen, to handcuff another citizen who is being rowdy. They are actually waiting for another squad car to arrive. Moss tells Grey that they always need backup for these kinds of situations — always, always.

The second squad car arrives quickly, just thirty seconds later. Just as Moss is opening his door — and Grey knows to stay put — there is the sound of glass breaking and a woman screaming in the house. It’s not like an oh-no-I’m-dying scream. It’s more like I’m-gonna-kill-you-motherfucker. Moss is moving quickly — but he also really enjoys having a person for him to share his knowledge and expertise with. Referring to the angry sound of broken glass, Moss tells Grey, “It sounds a lot like love,” before he exits out of the car and slams the door, before he greets his colleague, another cop. Female.

Because Grey is in the mode of trying to get out of a rut and amass a greater variety of people in his life — Azzie observed that Grey has a freakish number of white multi-gazillionaires in his circle and it’s weird as fuck — he reached out to Moss because Moss seems pretty cool. And not white.

They have a fair bit in common. They were both raised under lots of discipline. Grey’s dad is ex-military. Moss’s dad is a cop. Moss’s career is law enforcement. Grey’s career is tied to national security. They are both mama’s boys — at least a little bit. They both have an older brother. Both of their families were refugees who fled government persecution.

Love becomes a recurring theme of the night. Moss tells Grey that it is love when he stops by a club that is kind of known for attracting prostitution. Moss talks to the bouncer — about their kids and kindergarten.

After, Moss blurts out, “Holy shit,” before he laughs — when something new comes out on the scanner. It’s jargon that Grey doesn’t understand, so Moss has to explain it. He says that some drunk bastard t-boned a cop car. Moss asks Grey if he wants to go see it.

While he is bewildered at how unstructured this ride-along is, Grey still says, “Sure.”

And then Moss turns on his siren and hits the gas, driving faster than Grey has ever driven in his life.

Moss tells Grey that it is love, when he later buys Grey a plate of biscuits and gravy at his favorite late night diner. Grey had no choice in the matter. He has to eat the biscuits and gravy.

Randomly — but obviously not because Moss probably has been thinking about this for a while — Moss raises his cup of coffee to his mouth, and he asks Grey, “Yo, man. Do you ever feel like less of a man because of what happened to you?”

Grey says, “No. Never.”

Moss considers this and hums out a vague sound of approval. Then he says, “You gay, bro?”

“Why? You interested?” Grey retorts, shoveling carbs and fat that he has doused in hot sauce into his face. Admittedly it is pretty yummy.

“I’m happily married, man.”

“That’s such a sideways response to that, man,” Grey mutters, shoving the rest of a biscuit into his beyond-full mouth.

Moss laughs. He says, “You’re good at deflecting.”

“Thanks,” Grey says. “I try to be strategic about it.”

“So, was I right?” Moss asks. “Are these the best biscuits and gravy you’ve ever had?”

“Maybeee. They’re really tasty.”

“My entire family loves this place,” Moss says conversationally. “But then, my entire fam eats a lot of late night diner food during third shift. Except my mom and sister. They’re not cops. Plus, my sis can’t eat bread or anything that has gluten in it.”

Grey freezes — as a bunch of pieces click into place in his head. He remembers a throwaway comment on the ski trip. He freshly remembers the lengthy conversations he and Moss had in the car about how Naath and the Summer Isles are the same and how they are different. He takes another look at Moss’ face and tries to see if he can pick out something in it. Grey slowly says, “Your sister is Missandei.”

 

 

  
The lines of communication randomly and miraculously open up again between them again, when she wakes up at eight on Saturday, checks her phone, and sees two unread messages left for her. When she sees Grey’s name pop up in bold, her heart just starts beating a little bit faster and she is like, oh God — telling herself that she is pathetic for the flair of hope that has sprung up inside her.

The other message is from her brother.

She decides to read Grey’s message first. His message came in very late — or very early. It was at two in the morning. At two in the morning, he asked her to guess who he is with. And then he doesn’t even wait long before he answers his own question. Underneath the first text is a really grainy and dark photo of her brother in his uniform. And that is it. That is the extent of his communication to her.

She is wide awake now. She sits straight up in bed and holds her phone in her lap with both hands as she navigates to Moss’ message.  
  
It’s a photo of Grey — the same kind of photo quality. He is not smiling — probably caught by surprise. Moss’s text asked her if she actually knows this rando creep because this rando creep claims that he knows her.

She knows her brother is probably still awake for a little bit longer because he doesn’t go to sleep right away after his shift ends. She writes back to him. She writes: _OMG!_

She also asks how they know each other.

Moss response comes back in about ten minutes, as she’s in the middle of peeing into the toilet. She took her phone with her to the bathroom. His message says: _Met the other night when I busted him and his brother for public intoxication and drug use._

 

 

  
So she tries again. This random commonality emboldens her to try again — which is wildly out of character for her. Typically, she is so embarrassed that she just hides from the world and just lets it go. Typically, she just assumes the worst and assumes that the guy just wants nothing to do with her after she ineffectively tries to gaslight him and drives him away. Well, she still kind of assumes that. She assumes that Grey is just being polite and just saying, oh, isn’t this funny? Instead of saying, oh, have my babies.

She asks him if he wants to grab another bite together, sometime in the coming week. She takes her phone everywhere after that. It is glued to her hand — from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living toom to her grocery store and the rest of her errands. She realizes that it is taking him forever and it will continue to take him forever to respond because he is probably passed out, if he was awake at two in the morning with Moss.

It gives her so much time to live her anxiety out loud. She’s pushing a cart around and throwing vegetables into it with only half her attention, as her mind screams out, asking her what her end game is. On the very broad, very loud surface level, she rationalizes with herself and she tells herself that she would like to be friends with him because he seems cool and she needs more cool people in her life.

Slightly below that level, she is also telling herself that her crush on him is a lot like nearly every other crush she’s ever had — and most of them were back in high school, so she is still like a teenage girl — she is infatuated and obsessing over someone who isn’t even real. She is crushing on an idea, a figment that she thinks will be a contrast to her dad, someone who doesn’t get angry and yell, someone who is more demonstrative in his affection for her. She used to fantasize about epic gestures from guys — public declarations of love during school talent shows and all of that. She actually used to fantasize about guys who would save her from her dad.

This is why the unrealistic crushing has to stop. It’s not healthy. It feels nice because it gives her a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, but it’s keeping her from reality, an actual life where she works to get along with her dad and her family members, where she figures out, over and over again, that love actually manifests in a multitude of complicated ways and that the responsibility is on her, to save herself. She has figured that if she gets to know him better, she will stop putting him on a self-sabotaging pedestal that actually disempowers her rather than empowers her.

He doesn’t text her back until the afternoon. He says hi. And then he tells her that he’s actually free tonight.

She is wondering how he can just _do this_ , how he can readily admit that he doesn’t yet have Saturday night plans because he just does not care what people think about him and his social life.

She tells herself that confident people are nuts. She texts back and tells him that she is also free.

 

 

 

 


	15. Missy + Grey have second dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The love of his life wants to try to have dinner again. Grey is easy going enough so he goes along with it.

 

 

 

She takes his advice from forever ago. She shows up to the restaurant half an hour early, and she sits at the bar as she waits for their table to open up. She orders a vodka soda and works on drinking it before he arrives. She figures that if she’s a little bit tipsy, it will help her body relax and be comfortable with the twists and the bumps.

She is wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, heeled booties, and a zip-up hoodie. The jacket and the shoes don’t match — they are disapparate. But she paired them together on purpose. She doesn't want it to seem like she's trying hard to look too cute. She doesn’t want Grey to think that she thinks this is a date — that she is trying to date him.

She thinks about how she has probably gotten her heart broken once before — like the one time she cared about a boy enough to risk her life and disobey her parents. But the boy just turned around and was like, ‘Oh, just kidding. I don’t love you at all because you are Black.’ That really was devastating and stuff.

She thinks about how she grew up watching her parents fight and make up and fight — she grew up watching her dad be bad at hiding his cheating and watching her mom’s denial over it. As much as she has tried to undo the damage that caused in therapy, through self-awareness and deliberate action in _not_ becoming like her parents, maybe she will always be prone to thinking that love is loud and love is visceral and love maims and love hurts and love is not love unless someone is threatening to kill themselves with a knife.

She has intellectualized it. She has analyzed. She has used the tools she has gained from therapy, and she has laid it all out. She tells herself that she doesn’t actually know Grey at all. She doesn’t know who he is. She doesn’t know his integrity. She hasn’t been shown his fears and his insecurities. She knows just this superficial layer of him where he says funny stuff and smiles all handsome with confidence and she goes stupid in the brain because he is exemplifying all of these things she is lacking.

She knows that she finds him charismatic probably because the idea of the two of them together is dysfunctional. She might be a person who thrives on dysfunction. For instance, she won’t allow herself to find a nice guy that she can risk full intimacy with. Instead she is crushing on a guy that is just going to be forever out of reach. That seems dysfunctional.

Like, statistically, her hypothetical first marriage would probably be with a violent alcoholic who beats her as he tells her he loves her. And statistically, it would be very hard for her to leave this relationship because she’s just a little fucked in the brain because of her parents.

Maybe she is attracted to Grey because he is this person, and she just doesn’t know it yet. She imagines that _every_ woman who was ever abused initially looked at her abuser with such _hope_ and such _optimism._

Olenna always tells her to track when her anxiety is talking — and Missy hears it talking all the time. It is talking right now. But then, she hangs out with her folks or she goes over to her one of brothers’ houses, and she sees Mars getting uppity because his wife is showing too much skin — and Missy just can’t help but think that certain things are just inescapable. It takes generations to wean off of certain traumas. She is only the second generation here.

She’s a bit of a lightweight because she doesn’t drink that often or that much. The vodka soda permeates her body — well enough that when he shows up in the crowded restaurant, when he spots her easily through her hair, it is very easy for him to sneak up on her. He lunges and scares her with his hands suddenly pressing into her shoulders and an “ahhg!” sound. This causes her to jump in her seat and cover her chest, with both arms crossed over her breasts.

And when she realizes it is him — when she sees that it’s him in the flesh — she’s too wrapped up in what just happened to overthink much. She just shoves him in frustration. She says, “Grey! You made me think I was being assaulted!”

He doesn’t apologize to her for scaring her. He just laughs at her.

 

 

  
After they are settled in their seats, the two of them go over how wild it is that he knows her brother. She is nervous about what her brother might have shared about her and their family with Grey because her brothers are terrible at doing good PR for her. Moss probably told Grey that she is a friendless loser, which . . . Grey already knows. So that’s actually cool.

Grey tells her that he met Moss while his brother was in town because Moss and Azzie are old friends. He tells her that when he reached out to Moss out of boredom, he learned that Moss has a tough schedule and that when Moss is not working, he is spending time with family. So that is how Grey ended up signing a release stating that if he gets injured or killed while on a ride-along, the PD isn’t liable. Grey says, “Your brother is really outgoing and congenial.”

And it’s almost as if he is asking her how the hell she and her brother are so different from each other. She supposes that she can ask him the same thing — about him and his brother.

After she and Grey make polite observations about how small the world really is, she tells him straight up what is going on — before the server even takes their food order. She has learned a little bit from the fucking debacle that was their first hangout sesh together. All he asked for from her was the simple truth, and she couldn’t even give him that. So she honestly tells him that she is drinking so that she can relax around him and not be so shy. She forces herself to look him right in the face, as her heart throbs over how vulnerable she feels saying the truth to him. She tells him she’s really sorry about the last time they had dinner. It was really weird and really awkward.

He looks a little alarmed. His hand slides across the table just a little bit as he leans forward and toward her. He seriously tells her, “Don’t worry about last time. It was a little frustrating, but you know what? I think I overreacted a little bit. So I’m sorry for that. And you don’t have to drink in order to be around me. It’s okay for you to be uptight and shy. It’s not the worst thing in the world, that you’re awkward sometimes, Missandei.”

He sounds so concerned and so serious — that it makes her laugh. It’s because of the alcohol — and also because he’s just so fucking cute sometimes.

Her heart and the anxiety never slows down or lessen in magnitude. Her body is just on the edge for all of dinner — jittery, amped, tingly, hot, sweaty, and pulsating. She keeps drinking so much water in hopes of flushing out the heat and washing out the nerves. It sort of helps? The water is cold — and it also makes her have to excuse herself to go pee about three times during the meal.

She keeps apologizing to him for being just a mess — just a weird little mess. He keeps telling her to stop apologizing for it, that it is fine. He asks her if she’s always like this, in these situations — or if it’s something about him specifically that is drawing this out of her. She wonders if he’s referring to his lack of penis again, because it always seems to be the elephant in the room. Rather than saying it out loud, because it’s actually not _that_ — not right now at least — she tells him that the awkwardness might be a combination of him and also just of this situation and who she is as a person. She tells him that she’s just a very nervous and anxious person sometimes, when she is around people she is intimidated by. She’s not very good at hiding how she feels sometimes.

“Why are you intimidated by me?” he asks, scrunching up his nose, reaching out to pull some salad greens onto his plate with his fork and a knife. She has learned that he prefers to share food. She has learned that he automatically ordered something gluten-free, without her having to tell him that her dietary restriction makes it hard for her to share food with people.

“You’re just so _cool,”_ she confesses, and it makes him raise his brows in surprise. “You’ve had all of these cool experiences, and you have all of this interesting knowledge. And you’re funny and you say funny things effortlessly. And you just don’t even _care_ about what people think of you, whereas I care _a lot_ about what people must think of me. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be _you._ It’s hard not to be intimidated.” It all sounds just so earnestly heartfelt as it comes out of her mouth. She tries not to wince.

He says, “Wow,” as he pauses in his eating. He says, “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

 

 

  
Here are more things she learns over dinner:

She learns that he doesn’t ever say things just to say them — just to be polite. He doesn’t reciprocate and say nice things about her after she compliments him, for instance. He doesn’t tell her that he thinks she is also so cool — because she definitely knows that he doesn’t think she is very cool. He doesn’t tell her that he also finds her intimidating — because she knows that he doesn’t. He also doesn’t tell her that she is wrong in her compliments of him — that’s what she would do — it’s what she does when she gets complimented. She nervously tells people that they are mistaken about her.

She realizes that he knows he is cool. And she’s used to confidence that is overstated and loud. She is used to being in work meetings with people who display their talent and their competence by speaking those things out to the world. Grey’s brand of steady stealth-confidence is trippy. It is different.

They have a pretty good conversation over dinner. They keep referring to their first dinner together and what a disaster it was, in soft low-key ways. She notices that the both of them have gone out of their way to be overly articulated in how they refer to their first outing. Neither of them are referring to it as a date.

He asks her if she likes the food again. And she readily tells him that she does. She gives him some detail on what she likes about the food. She tells him that she likes that the salad greens are a little bit bitter because bitterness is an underrated flavor profile — and it makes him laugh right away, because he can tell that she is working _so hard_ to make this go smoothly and to make dinner feel pleasant for him. He can tell she is eager to please right now — and this knowledge keeps making him smile at her. She loves that he apparently thinks she is funny right now. And she can tell that he likes seeing effort — another one of those things about him that she is learning.

They talk about their families. She awkwardly asks him why he lives with his parents — does he really like them or something? He sardonically repeats her question back at her — he asks her if she is wondering if he’s some guy with a Peter Pan complex that can’t cut the umbilical cord from his mother. She hastily tells him that she does _not_ think that at all — because she actually thinks that it’s kind of sweet that he is close with his parents. She understands it — culturally.

He tells her about his dad’s bout with thyroid cancer — and how he wasn’t told because his parents probably believe too much in self-sufficiency — and maybe also because he is their son and not their equal. In any case, he had been away for years and he felt that that the geographical distance was harming their relationship. He says, “It’s fucking crazy to not get told your dad has cancer because he didn’t want to _inconvenience_ you by bringing up something that would make you confront the fact that he is going to die — eventually. It’s fucking infuriating. So, I moved back.”

She tells him about her own thyroid issues — self-consciously. She tells him that she doesn’t mean to compare the two things, his dad’s cancer and her silly hypothyroidism. But she brings it up because it’s also a thyroid thing.

She actually talks a lot about her health issues. She tells him that she’s finally got a pretty good handle on it all now, but there were long years when she just didn’t know what was going on in her body — and those years were frustrating, lonely, and also really terrifying. She melodramatically felt like she was slowly dying young at times. She also sometimes felt like she was going crazy, because a lot of people — her parents, her brothers, _medical professionals_ — were telling her that at least some of her symptoms were psychosomatic. She sarcastically says, “Like I wanted to give myself three days of diarrhea and stomach pains after eating a corndog.”

After she finishes her story, the opening is pretty clear. The invitation is pretty logical.

But Grey does not bring up his body or his penis or his other health things, whatever they may be. And — now that she has a better idea of the kind of person he is — she knows that the omission is deliberate.

Instead, he asks her, “So what happened at work? You said people were fired because stuff they said about you?”

 

 

  
They end up talking for a really long time — they actually have to leave the restaurant because it’s closing up and they are the last ones there. She’s embarrassed about that — she didn’t realize that she was holding people up. She quickly gathers up her things — her jacket, her purse, her phone — and she scurries out the glass doors, leaving him to follow.

They are standing next to his car in the parking lot — which is parked next to hers — when she blandly observes that it’s pretty late. She has no idea where to go from here. This kind of situation is new to her. She tries to think back to how she ended dinner with Dany or Yara, back when it was new with them. And she can’t recall. It was too long ago and they were in college, so they weren’t even doing adult things like going out to restaurants. They just hung out at each other’s apartments or dorms and chatted until they passed out or until they dragged themselves up off the floor to walk home.

She can’t freaking ask him if he wants to go back to her apartment to keep on chatting. That would give him the wrong idea.

He ends up making the decision for her — kind of unaware that it is causing her a little bit of turmoil. He says, “Alright, that was a lot better than the first time. Holy shit, Missandei, I think we can be friends.”

“I thought we were already friends?” she blurts — kind of sounding wounded about it.

“We are,” he assures her, as he spontaneously pulls open the driver’s side door to his car and bends over, ducking into it. She bewilderingly wonders if this is how they are going to say goodbye to each other — her face to his ass. But then he pulls his body back out and he's holding a shiny, crinkly foil packet. It’s mint gum, the chiclet kind. He shuts his car door with his foot and then he’s wrestling with the packet and trying to pop out a piece. He’s smiling at his hands as he watches what he’s doing. He says, “I meant better friends. Want a piece?” He takes her wrist without waiting for her answer anyway. He places gum in the middle of her palm.

The casual and easy nature of this tiny action just gets to her, so _badly._ Her face is on _fire._ And she hurriedly shoves the gum into her mouth to hide it.

He tosses gum into his mouth, too, as he maintains eye contact and grins at her. He looks like he wants to say something else — like he wants to make an observation about her — but he apparently decides to refrain from doing so. Instead, he reaches for her with his hands.

She completely _freezes_ her entire body into a plank and leans back slightly — in fear. She’s bracing herself for it.

It makes him stop, his face frowning. His arms, which were out, drop down to his sides.

She nervously stands in front of him, just confused, disoriented, and uncertain. She’s worried that she has done something wrong. She’s worried that she has done something weird.

And then after a few seconds — his expression falls into this relief and this soft smile — and he laughs, with his face slightly turned up to the dark sky. He’s shaking his head at himself.

She is still confused and worried — now about what is going on.

He loudly says, “Oh my God, you thought I was going to kiss you! Oh my God, with the gum and everything! Oh my God, that would’ve been such a gangsta move!” He’s cracking up now, leaning heavily against his car with his hand braced against the side of the roof. His eyes are bright and kind of shiny, as he lowers the volume of his voice a little bit. He says, “I was trying to hug you goodbye. I gave you gum because we just ate a shit-ton of garlic and onions. I didn’t give you the gum to be like, ‘Get your mouth ready, Missandei. I’m going to get in there.’ I’m sorry! I didn’t realize what it looked like. I didn’t mean to freak you out. It was totally innocent!”

 

 

 

 

 


	16. Grey and Missy clean gutters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei gets to know the future love of her life better. She learns that he is awesome, just like everyone has been telling her he is. She is in deep shit now, guys.

 

 

 

  
After the rousing success of second-dinner, she dedicates a delusional amount of time trying to find his flaws so that she can use them to armor herself with, to make herself like him less. She has the time — so does he. Neither of them have talked about this extensively because it feels gossipy and petty — and it also still stings — but they have both distanced themselves from their best friends.

Missandei has been spending less time with Dany because at least part of the reason why they are such good friends is because Dany’s superiority over Missy is never challenged — by _anyone._ And Missandei loves Daenerys, but she doesn’t know what good it does for her mental health, to spend so much time with a person that is always taking care of her, to depend so much on a person that is always needing to save her and protect her.

So Grey has a number of flaws, to be sure. Like, he stops being nice to her all the time.

After she suggests they go grab yet another bite to eat, he grumbles and tells her that they can’t just eat all the time together — they are going to get mega-fat this way. It makes her gesture to their bodies and tell him that the both of them are actually not anywhere close to being fat, but he explains to her that what he’s really bitching about routine. He explains this to her like she is stupid, like he’s disappointed in her for not reading in between the lines. He tells her that he does not like routine, and all they do together is eat.

She reminds him that she’s not good at sports — at least not enough for it to be any fun for him. If they were to play a game, all he’d be doing is standing around waiting as she ran all around the field or the court, trying to retrieve a ball that she didn’t catch.

In response to this, he flatly says, “I’m not trying to get you play a pick-up game, Missandei. I already know it would be torture for me.”

She can tell that he misses Drogo. This would be the kind of stuff that he’d being doing with Drogo. She happens to know that Drogo also misses Grey — a lot. None of it has been explicitly said to her. It’s just obvious.

She and Grey can’t drink for very long together. The problem is that he is really good at drinking, and she gets drunk after three-quarters of a glass. He crankily tells her that he doesn’t want to drag her incapacitated, unconscious ass all over town and pretend they are having a fun night out because she just can’t handle her alcohol and because she is sleep-deprived all the time.

She suggests going to a show or a concert. This is when he confirms to himself that her taste in music is girly and not Black enough. She likes radio hits and catchy hooks like a white sorority girl.

Missandei is pretty offended by this assessment, but she can’t really argue the point. He is right, but he doesn’t need to make her feel bad about it.

He starts crafting playlists for her to listen to so she can get her shit right. He tells her he can’t go to a show with her until she gets her shit straight.

When they go see a movie together — he falls asleep in the first fifteen minutes. She is stunned when she looks over and sees his baseball cap pulled down low and his eyes closed — like, he knew to try and hide his snoozing. Like, he fell asleep on purpose.

Afterward, she calls him out for being a hypocrite, because he is also sleep-deprived all the time. In response to her accusation, he corrects her. He says, “I never said I wasn’t sleep-deprived. I just said that you were. And you _are.”_

She says, “I didn’t fall asleep during the movie though!”

And he has the balls to dismissively say, “The movie was boring.”

She has learned that behind all of his affable smiles — which she has figured out are kind of always a little bit benignly manipulative — he is insanely bossy, demanding, and really critical.  
  
The thing is — she is _so into all of this._ She finds all of his terrible personality traits to be really mesmerizing and thrilling and attractive. She really likes the way he looks when he scowls. She really likes to track his expression when he’s applying effort at not rolling his eyes. She really admires that he always knows what he thinks and how he feels about everything. She continues to be attracted to all the things he exhibits that she does not exemplify. And when she watches him go a little nuts because there’s a small inaccuracy with Google Maps — it directed him to the wrong side of the street — as she watches him curse out Google Maps and threaten to send them an angry email that no one will read whatsoever, she vaguely wonders if he reminds her of her dad too much.

And then there are the times when he is sweet. If the darker parts of his personality amuse and charm her — then the light parts of his personality just constantly gut her.

She watches him walk into a glass door leading to an art gallery because the door is so clean — she watches him smack right into it and then look at himself before looking at the glass in stunned shock. And then she watches him pull his sleeve over his hand to wipe at the smudges that his hands and face left. He says to her, “Oh man, someone did such a good job cleaning this. I made it dirty.”

She laughs and shrieks when he spontaneously wraps her head in his arm in an easy headlock. She’s cracking up and half-heartedly fighting him off as he covers her mouth and nose with his hand, suffocating her as they stroll by a bakery. He is tripping her up, so he is holding her body weight up and pulling her down the sidewalk as he talks into her ear. His voice is thick in her head as he tells her, “Don’t breathe in. You’ll be okay, Missandei. You’ll be _okay.”_

As people stare at them in amusement, he cracks up and mutters to her that it’s fucking bullshit. It’s fucking bullshit that he is obviously assaulting her right now — dragging her down the street with his hand covering her screams — and no one is intervening. In awe, he mutters, “What is this shit? Come on, humanity. Help me believe in you.”

 

 

  
He positions the ladder against the house and doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot to check its sturdiness before he starts climbing up it, with the hose and wand of the pressure washer hooked over his shoulder. She waits for him to get the very top before she nervously grasps onto a rung. She looks up as he looks down. His eyes and his face are encouraging and attentive, as she starts climbing up the stupid thing.

Transferring herself from the ladder to the roof is nerve-wracking. He has to help her because she’s so physically awkward at it that he’s afraid she’s going to lose her balance and just fall the fuck off and die in front of him face, just devastating and traumatizing the shit out of him for the rest of his life. He grasps her hand and gently guides her and helps her keep her balance as she stumbles onto the roof. She immediately sits down and pulls her knees up to her chest. He smiles down at her, and he says, “This is really what you wanna do on your day off? You really wanna help me clean my parents’ gutters?”

“Oh,” she says, breathing hard, her voice high. “We both know that I’m not going to actually be any help at all. I just wanna watch.”

 

 

  
He’s wet and speckled with rotted leaves and dirt when he’s done, when he ties up two large garbage bags full of pine needles, twigs, and leaves and takes them down with him along with the pressure washer hose and wand. She offers to lighten the load and to carry something down for him, but he shakes his head and tells her that it’s safer if he takes it all down himself.

For a moment, Missandei thinks he’s being chivalrous. But then she realizes that he’s actually insulting her. He’s sassing her.

Her legs are noodle-y from the climb down, as she watches him retract the ladder loudly, as clicking metal ends with the other end smacking down to the ground. She goes over and turns off the hose as he puts the ladder back into the shed and empties the trash bags into the yard waste bin. She stands around doing nothing as he coils up the pressure washer house and steadily drags it to the garage, where it lives. Not for the first time since she has known him, she kind of marvels to herself — at how _good_ he is at this kind of stuff — at how he has a lot of endurance for this kind of stuff. He’s also a good son. He bitches about so many things, but she never hears him bitch about helping his parents out.

His parents totally think they are dating. Or they want the two of them to be dating. It’s pretty clear because his dad always cracks the same joke about how they better keep the bedroom door open whenever she comes over to visit. It’s also pretty clear because Grey plainly said it to her. He told her that his parents are fucking annoying because they are just so obsessed with her for dumb reasons and want to make her their daughter-in-law, those fucking psychos.

The house is empty and quiet because his parents are off doing errands. They take off their wet shoes before entering in from the back. He pinches his wet, leaf-speckled shirt with two fingers at his stomach and he pulls the material away from his body. She averts her eyes. He asks her if it’s okay if he hops into the shower real quick. She keeps her eyes trained on the salt and pepper shakers on his parents dining table because sometimes she still has issues looking directly at him. She tells him to go nuts. Go nuts in shower.

He says, “That’s such a weird thing to say,” because he’s just so comfortable calling out her awkwardness now. “Alright, I’ll just be five minutes. Do you wanna figure out what you wanna do for dinner in the meantime?”

“Sure,” she says.

“Awesome,” he says, as he makes his way down the hall, facing away from her, his hand going to the closure of his pants as he disappears into his bedroom.

 

 

  
She’s sitting by herself at the kitchen table, browsing at restaurants on her phone when his parents come home. She’s trying to find something new to eat because he likes variety — and also something that has stuff on the menu that won’t accidentally make her sick.

She puts down her phone and straightens in her seat when his parents enter the house with an armful of groceries — because she has these ingrained habits when it comes to deference of elders. When his mom spots her, his mom registers just mild surprise and then says, “Hey, Missandei. Where’s Grey?”

Missandei gets out of her seat to help pull some of the bags out of his mom’s arms. She says, “He’s in the shower.” And then before his dad can open his mouth to say something inappropriate and funny, Missandei quickly says, “He just finished cleaning the gutters.”

“And he made you help him?” his dad asks quizzically, pulling items out of their grocery bags and putting them on the stove. “What a gentleman.”

“I wanted to help,” she says quickly, worried that Grey’s dad is going to get on his butt for this later. “He didn’t make me help. I mean, I actually wasn’t any help, honestly. I mostly just watched and distracted him as he was doing it. I mean —”

“Hon,” Grey’s dad says to her, his eyes crinkling as his face morphs into a kind smile. He winks at her. “Relax. I was just joking.”

 

 

  
His parents basically bully Missandei into having dinner at home with them. Missandei is emotional and weak-willed sometimes — she has a soft spot for old people — so she agrees to ditch their up-in-the-air dinner plans to just stay in with his parents. They have this discussion without him. Grey learns all of this after he gets out of the shower and his dad is hollering his name. He’s quickly wiping down his wet body with a towel as he calls back and tells his dad to hold on a minute — which sounds borderline dicey. His dad is big on tone. And on hierarchy. It might be a combination of his military training and his cultural upbringing. Children don’t challenge their parents. This is why his dad and his brother constantly ram their heads together all the time.

Grey hears his dad yell, “The fuck! Do you think you curing cancer in there? Get the hell out here! I’m trying to talk to you!”

Grey looks at himself in the foggy mirror. He shakes his head at himself. And then he wraps his damp towel tightly around his waist and walks out.

He says, “Yes?” to the room when he walks out, instead of “yeah?” or “what?” because the latter two responses might cause his dad to go batshit. He also focuses on him mom, because she is a good focal point in these moments.

“I have an idea,” his dad announces.

“What’s your idea?”

“Why don’t you kids just have dinner here?” his dad says. “Save some money. And we have so much food anyway. Missandei thinks it’s really a good idea, but she wanted me to ask you.”

“I can make your favorite, baby,” his mom says. “And it can be gluten-free for Missandei. I’ve been thinking about how I can adjust my recipe!”

His parents have started buying gluten-free food for the house — for the random times that Missandei comes over. He is reminded of this every time he opens cabinet doors in the kitchen.

He looks at Missandei, this fucking traitor — who can’t look at him because of course she can’t. He has one hand on his towel and the other pointing an accusing finger at her. He says, “You’re _weak,_ Missandei!”

She is covering her eyes and saying, “I know, I _know!_ Your mom was saying that she was already getting a big pot of rice ready, and I just crumbled!”

His dad is like, “Son, _this_ is how you talk women?”

Grey says, “Just this one,” maintaining a straight face for two seconds before it cracks into a very, very small smile. And then he goes into his room to change into his clothes.

 

 

  
She tries to help his mom in the kitchen, but like her own mother — Missandei honestly only gets in the way. So she starts trying to clean after the woman — but Grey’s mom eventually laughs and just kicks her out of the kitchen and tells her to relax. It feels like an indictment every time one of his parents tells her to relax. It’s like they think she is working so hard to impress them because they think that she is so _obsessed_ with their son. That’s not the truth. She is working so hard to impress them because she submits to authority figures really easily because her own parents were overbearing and taught her to never question them. Duh.

So she sits at the kitchen table and feels pretty much useless as his mom cooks. Grey and his dad are in the garage, fussing over the progress of their beer, which she obviously can’t drink. She can only smell it, and get bored listening to long explanations on water chemistry.

“Do you like to cook?” Grey’s mom asks her, and Missandei thinks his mom is asking her this so that his mom can figure out if Missandei’s going to be a good wife to her son by having dinner ready on the table for him every night.

“I’m not sure,” Missandei says, feeling awkward. “I don’t cook very much. Because it’s just me in my apartment. And when my family gets together, my mom does all the cooking.”

“She must be a very good cook then,” Grey’s mom says mildly. “I actually wasn’t a very good cook when we started our family. I was the youngest girl in my family, too. So everyone was always taking care of me so I never had to learn how to cook. My job was just to study hard all the time.” Then, she just lets that statement hang for a bit, as she drains water from the pot of rice in the sink. “But then we came over here and I had to learn how to cook, so I started trying to recreate food from home based on what I remembered — and it was godawful in the beginning.” She laughs, her voice flowing out easily and cheerfully. She kind of laughs like how Grey laughs — and it makes Missandei think that this is where he gets that part of himself from.

“How did you get good?”

“I’m not sure I’m really _that_ good,” she says. “My older sisters are still much better cooks. But I can feed my family. I’ve been feeding my family for a long time now.”

After that, Grey’s mom gives her a job that she can handle. Grey’s mom puts a basket of washed green beans down in front of her and has her pick off the ends. His mom shows her how it should be done and Missandei shyly takes the lesson — and then she nervously continues picking off ends once she is left on her own.

She’s generally pretty quiet as Grey’s mom keeps chatting, finding it pretty easy to carry the conversation for the both of them — probably another thing she shares with both of her sons. Missandei learns that his mom was a caseworker for the state before she earned her law degree. She kind of fell into the job because of her language skills — because she was able to speak three languages and translate between new immigrant families and the various entities they needed to navigate through. His mom flippantly tells Missandei that Grey’s dad is actually an excellent cook and baker — because he likes precision and the chemistry behind the processes. She tells Missandei that, come to think of it, the boys are also really good cooks themselves — because they often had to fend for themselves when they were little, because their parents were always working.

“Grey’s really good at making bacon,” Missandei blurts. And then she immediately regrets it because she sounds like a complete dillweed who doesn’t know how to talk to other humans. She also sounds like someone that Grey makes bacon for _in the morning._ After they _have sex_ together. So that is fucking _awesome._ Just feeding the fire. Just haplessly feeding the fire like an _idiot._

His mom is kind though. His mom pauses. And then says, “Yes. I think I’ve seen him make bacon once or twice. He’s very clean about it.”

 

 

  
After dinner, after Grey washes the dishes, they all settle on the couches and Missandei learns that Jeopardy airs on Saturday nights. She also learns that Grey’s dad is like — some kind of a genius. His dad is always quick to flatter her, so any question that is related to literature or language, he always looks over to her and tells her that they must be easy for her. She has to stop herself from confessing to him that not many things are easy for her — except language acquisition, yes.

After Jeopardy, his dad says, “Come on, Sanaa,” as he gets up from his chair, as he holds his hand out to Grey’s mom. He pulls her up from her seat and smooths his hand down her back. “Let’s give the kids some alone time.” And then to Grey, he says, “Turn off the TV and lock the doors before you leave or go to bed. I don’t want to get murdered in my sleep, thank you very much.”

“Yeah, sure,” Grey says, his eyes still trained on the glowing screen. He has snatched up the remote and is flipping channels rapidly. Law & Order or Criminal Minds or a random TV movie is about to come on.

When his parents are gone, after the door to their bedroom is closed, Grey immediately slides down the couch — taking up the space that his mom was sitting in. He pulls over a throw pillow and pops it behind his head, propping it up as he continues flipping channels lying down. He mutters, “Fucking cable TV, man,” as he rapidly presses remote buttons. He adds, “What is _this?_ God, how do these old people even find what they want to watch? I keep trying to get my folks to cancel cable and let me hook up a streaming service for them, but my dad is like — well, you know my dad. He is _reasonable.”_

Missandei wraps her hands together and she lets out a long sigh. She completely changes the subject, taking it off how much he hates cable TV by saying, “Your parents still really love each other, don’t they?”

“Oh my God, are they having sex?” Grey immediately asks, tilting his ear in the direction of his parents bedroom, trying to listen for sounds. He thinks that Missandei is bringing this up because she can hear his parents having sex and she is being politely awkward about it. He doesn’t hear anything.

And she slowly says, “I don’t know?”

He says, “Nevermind,” as his body relaxes, as he sinks a little bit deeper into his parents’ firm leather couch. He folds his hands behind his head and he goes back to staring at the TV screen.

“They’re really cute together,” she offers cautiously. “Even when they’re yelling at each other — it’s still obvious they care about each other.”

“I guess,” Grey mutters. “I guess you’re right. My mom is definitely my dad’s favorite. He’s always telling me and Azzie that he loves us less than he loves our mom. I’m always like, ‘Dad, I’m not even soliciting a ranking from you, on the magnitude of your love.’ And he’s always like, ‘Oh, I know. I just think you should know.’” Grey laughs quietly at that.

“My parents aren’t like that,” she says to him. “I don’t think they were even in love when I was born. So it’s really nice — being around your parents.”

It’s the first time either one of them have referred to something like this. Thus far, their conversations have had depth — but not that much historical pain. He hasn’t talked about his injury beyond casual mentions that it exists and the occasional joke about it. She can almost track how often it is on his mind based on his comments and jokes. On her end, she hasn’t told him much about her parents. So far it has been mostly about their likes and their dislikes of random things.

But now, he finally senses that her mood has changed — there’s something heavy in it, so he quickly pushes himself into sitting position and mutes the TV so that he can put his full attention on her. He leans forward, with the blue haze from the TV pushing into his face, as he stares at her. She asks him how much he thinks he’s been affected by his parents — how his outlook on love and relationships and devotion has been affected by what has been modeled for him.

After some thought — he doesn’t know where this conversation is going at all — he can’t figure out what she is trying to get at all — he tells her that it’s a hard question for him to answer. Because it’s all he has known. It would be like asking a fish what it is like to swim in water.

She tells him she can’t imagine the kind of person she’d be, if she had parents who were affectionate like his parents are — who respect each other like his parents do — who are equal partners in life like they seem to be.

She wryly smiles at him, and she speculates that she’d probably be a lot more like him — maybe a lot more confident, more easy-going, more charismatic, more open, more likeable — less risk-averse — braver.

 

 

  
As he walks her to her car, he realizes in the back of his mind that they have been spending so much time together — possibly too much time together. Like, it might be becoming complicated. Like, they might be getting all claustrophobic with each other. He knows that she has a tendency of being scared of newness, and he has a tendency of being tolerant of sameness. They are not really new to each other anymore.

She touches his hand as they stop in front of her car, just for a brief second. She lightly squeezes his fingers in gratitude, because he did a whole lot of listening tonight and now she kind of feels self-conscious about all of the sharing that she did with him.

When it’s time to say goodbye, her arms come up automatically as he ducks down a little bit — they have done this enough times that it’s kind of a routine now — except for the way that it makes her feel inside. It makes her throb inside. And that is going to be something that is gonna be hard to get used to.

She grasps onto his shoulders and hangs on as his strong arms go around her ribs, as he softly crushes her body into his warmth. She presses her face into his neck because she is just saying _fuck it,_ as she hugs him back tightly and she takes a big sniff. He smells really clean, because of his shower.

He’s chuckling as he starts to let her go, and as she lowers herself from her tiptoes to the flat of her feet, as the heavy presence of his palms slowly drags up her spine. He says, “Did you just smell me?”

She says, “Sorry,” because she assumes it was too much.

“No, it’s totally fine. It was really cute,” he says. And she’s still trying to figure out if she fucking heard him right — as he says, “Thanks so much for hanging out today and helping with the gutters. And thank you for chilling with my parents. I know it was sometimes boring, and it’s not really what anyone actually wants to do on their day off — so I really appreciate it, Missandei.” And then he takes in a breath. And then he says, “You’re _so great,_ you know? You’re just so much fun to be around. I just have such a _nice_ time when I’m around you. Thanks _so much_ — just for being _you.”_

 

 

  
When she sees Olenna at her next therapy session, she is smearing her hands over her face, smearing her makeup. But it’s okay, it’s the end of the day. She mutters into her palms, and she confesses to Olenna that she has learned that he is actually so fucking wonderful. He is just so fucking amazing. The reality of him is actually exponentially better than what she had imagined him to be. It is so fucking terrible.

“Why is it so terrible?” Olenna asks, smiling softly.

Missandei drops her hands off her face. She presses her elbows deeper into her knees. She swings her eyes up to look Olenna in the face. She doesn’t even answer the question because it doesn’t need to be answered. She just stares back at her therapist.

 

 

 

 

 


	17. Grey runs into his ex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The path to happily ever after hits a snag because Grey runs into an ex. Missy is still telling herself she doesn't want to bone the future love of her life. Yara continues to be effortlessly wonderful and badass.

 

 

 

Everyone that he went to high school with pretty much knew about his dick situation because that kind of gossip just doesn’t stay underwraps for very long. Nearly all the kids that he went to elementary and middle school with matriculated up to the same high school. They all know someone who was there when all of the screaming was happening and all of the blood was coming out — or they all know Drogo specifically. They all can recite some version of the story of Grey getting his penis smashed by Drogo while on school grounds, including the loud ambulance that came and disrupted everyone’s classes for the rest of the day and the fact that the west side of the school was locked up and coned off because the blood needed to be professionally cleaned up.

His classmates also remember inquiring about him and getting trickle updates on him, because he was hospitalized and underwent a few surgeries. As a result, he missed a lot of school. They all remember writing and drawing him get-well cards under the guidance of their teachers, bundling it all up in a manila envelope and sending it to his house to cheer him up.

That’s his context as he walks into what he _thinks_ is Kojja’s high-rise condo, into a gathering room full of people he is struggling to recognize.

He doesn’t see anyone familiar at all — he doesn’t see Kojja — so he’s wondering if it’s possible that he walked into the wrong place when he hears a familiar voice amid the droning chatter of the party and the music. She has to shout at him to be heard.

“Hey! Do I know you!”

Grey slowly turns around. He then sees a slender, tall woman with a riot of loose curls falling asymmetrically on her smooth brown, bare shoulder. Her full lips still constantly makes her face fall into a natural pout. She still has dimples when she smiles. The unexpected sight of her makes him raise his brows in surprise. He says, “Yaya.”

She smiles at that — at the way he says her name and probably the memories that it stirs up to the surface. She kind of shrugs a little in amusement. She gently nudges her way around a big man, patting him on the shoulder and excusing herself. She edges herself closer to Grey over the course of three seconds. And then right when she gets right in front of him, she says, “I heard through the grapevine you’ve been back for . . . at least six months. And what? You didn’t think to call me up to catch up at all in these six months?” Her voice is still husky and smoky — she still sounds a little too old and wise for how she looks.

He smiles at her in apology — so a smile that is strained and kind of regretful. He says, “Sorry. You weren’t top of mind.”

That makes her laugh — because she still remembers what he is like. “Well, rectify it,” she says, reaching out to lightly knock him in the stomach with her fist. “Get me a drink and tell me everything you’ve been up to.” And then, after a short pause that she uses to run her eyes all over his face, she says, “You look so good.”

 

 

  
He realizes that this was the reason he’s been reluctant to reach out to Kojja. He has refrained from catching up with Kojja because he was afraid that doing so would result in him running into Alayaya.

They slowly push their way to the quietest corner of the room — and it takes them a while to get there because the distance between the door and the corner by the pool table is actually littered with a bunch of old friends. He runs into Tal, Balaq, and Xhondo, who all react in shock when they see him — before they all screech out, “Holy shit! Grey!” and reach their hands out to touch him in greeting. He starts making all of these promises to come back around to catch up with them in a bit.

He also runs into Kojja, finally, by the open windows where she is sitting on the sill. She is talking to a woman he doesn’t know. Kojja’s in a crop top and her chunky earrings hit him in the face as she eagerly stands to hug him. His hands falls to her back. She still feels strong.

She grabs onto his biceps as she pulls away a little bit to look at him, as she smiles widely. She tells him that she can’t believe it. She can’t believe she’s looking at him — that she’s got her hands on him. He cautiously touches the side of her shaved head — because it is new to him — and he tells her she looks great. She tells him that it is so crazy. She admonishes him and tells him that he should’ve called her sooner. She cups his face in her hands and squeezes his cheeks together fondly. Then she says, “Where’s Drogo?”

He says, “Oh, he’s not here. I didn’t think to bring him.”

She doesn’t seem fazed by this. She just scrunches her forehead in acknowledgement and says, “Ah, that’s a bummer. I haven’t seen him in forever. It would’ve been nice to.” The truth is — she and Drogo didn’t get along that great when they were all younger.

 

 

  
When the party runs out of store-bought ice and they see that the ice maker can’t keep up fast enough, Alayaya volunteers the two of them to go buy some more. He goes along with it because there’s not really anything she can say or do to him that can hurt him anymore. He waits patiently by the door, holding it open as she shrugs into her leather jacket, as she pulls the ends of her hair out of the collar.

She brushes him as she passes by him. He smells her perfume and her shampoo. It makes him remember the way she used to smell and the way she used to make him feel when he pulled her into his lap and she slowly wrapped her limbs around him. It makes him remember the way he used to shiver when she told him that she loved him.

At the grocery store, she slouches in front of the freezer in her boots and her black skirt, staring at the price of ice before she opens the door and slowly pulls out two heavy bags. She lets the door shut itself as she smiles softly at him, as her heels click down the brightly lit aisle, as she holds a bag in each hand.

 

 

  
“How are you parents?” she asks him, as she starts up her car again.

“They’re good,” he says. “Dad’s retired now.”

“No way,” she says. “I never thought he’d retire. How old is he now?”

“Sixty-six. He actually retired because my mom made him. She felt he was working himself to death. How are your folks?”

“They’re good,” she says. “They’re actually divorced now, believe it or not.”

“Oh — wow.”

“Yeah, after more than thirty years together, my mom woke up one day and decided she didn’t want to be married anymore. She goes on cruises with her friends and is taking a painting class. My dad bought a mobile home near the high school a few years back. He seems okay enough but, you know, things are different now.”

 

 

  
He turns up the music on his drive home — he wants to listen to something with a beat and something that sounds optimistic and hopeful right now. He wonders what it is in life he is even _looking for_ , what it is he is _waiting for_.

Even though he tries to be as quiet as he can when he gets home — because he doesn’t want to wake up his folks — his dad still manages to scare the shit out of him by suddenly appearing next to him as Grey guzzles from a carton of milk.

Grey coughs violently and pats his own chest as he hacks out speckles of cold milk from his lungs. He reaches for the washcloth and wets it at the sink before he stoops down and starts wiping up his mess. He quietly says, “Dad, why are you awake, and why are you _naked?”_

“Uh, because this my house?” his dad says, as he reaches up to open a cabinet. He’s pulling out a glass as he says, “I really wish you wouldn’t drink directly from the carton.”

“I was gonna drink the rest of it.”

“Still, it grosses me out.”

 

 

  
His dad makes it hard for Grey to voice any sort of insecurity out loud because his dad always gets so angry when Grey vocalizes any doubt of his worthiness. If anything, he is probably a ‘victim’ of his dad’s extreme high hopes. He is his dad’s optimism. His dad keeps thinking that Grey is capable of _everything._ His dad felt pain when Grey decided not to go to medical school because his dad remembers holding Grey in his arms when Grey was a baby, and his dad remembers thinking that his son was going to have _everything_ and that the possibilities for this child are _endless._ His dad mourns what was taken away from his life — family, time, education, and potential mostly. His dad believed this loss was going to be reappropriated by his sons. His dad sometimes talks about his intelligence and his talents in the past tense — his dad sometimes accidentally says, “You were so smart. You had so much promise.”

It doesn’t hurt to hear this either. Grey understands the history behind it. He also wishes he could have been enough for his dad.

When he finishes cleaning up the milk, his dad asks Grey why he even bothers driving all the way home so late. Why not just sleep over at Missandei’s? His dad asks if she’s a prude or old-fashioned or something — if she isn’t letting him stay the night without some sort of commitment or something.

Grey shakes his head at his dad, and — again — he tells his dad that he and Missandei aren’t like that, so please cut this shit out. It’s not funny anymore. He gulps down the rest of the cold milk from the jug, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and then he washes the carton out before tossing it into the recycling bin.

Grey tells his dad he wasn’t with Missandei tonight anyway. He went to see Kojja. And guess who he ran into at Kojja’s place?

His dad says, “Nudho, it’s late. I’m not going to guess. Just tell me.”

“Alayaya.”

“Oh,” his dad says. “Okay.”

“That’s it? That’s your response?”

His dad shakes his head. “What else did you want me to say? Like I said, son, it’s really late. It’s not really a shocker. You ran into your ex at the house of a mutual friend. My mind is fucking blown. There, you happy?”

“She wants to get together for coffee and to catch up.”

“Okay?”

 _“Dad_ —”

“Seriously, son, what do you want from me? So your ex wants to have a beverage with you. Did you tell that bitch yes, I will have a beverage with you? Or did you tell that bitch no, I will not have a beverage with you? Come on, I am on the edge of my seat here.”

Grey feels kind of defeated. And tired. He feels like it had been a mistake to try to connect — especially at this time of night. He says, “I said yes.”

“Oh, interesting,” he dad says. “You’re a great storyteller. Alright, I’m going back to bed. You should do the same after you wash that towel again. I don’t want it smell all sour like rotting milk later. Night, son. I love you.”

 

 

  
Olenna tells her that she has got to stop attributing how she feels about Grey to her thyroid medicine. It’s not her thyroid medicine that is driving these feelings of attachment and attraction. It’s not the medication that is making her feel happy when she is around him. Olenna tells Missandei that her hypothalamus is probably producing a lot of dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin right now.

Olenna also tells her that it is easy to blame how she feels on the success of the thyroid medicine because she can then treat her feelings as a side effect of the drug. Olenna says, “And I am telling you, Missandei — the drug does not work like that. Trust me.”

Missy dryly says, “I know, Olenna. I know my thyroid med isn’t female Viagra, otherwise so many women would be taking this stuff. There would be like, a black market for this stuff.” She is in a calm and easy mood today. She doesn’t plan to cry in therapy today. She had a great meeting with her boss, who gave her good feedback. She currently has nothing to complain about, in regard to her family. She tells Olenna, “I think I mostly refer to the thyroid medication as an ongoing joke. I like to joke about it and be like, oh, I want to crawl into him and have hours of cuddle and smoochie time with him because _my thyroid medication is working great._ Like, that’s funny.” She pauses, because she really wants to bask in Olenna’s ultra skeptical look. So Missy adds, “Also, joking about it helps me avoid actually having to deal with it. Clearly.”

Olenna says, “Why don’t you tell him how you are feeling? Why don’t you tell him how you feel about him?” Olenna keeps trying to advocate for the truth — and Olenna keeps trying to convince her that the truth doesn’t have to always be world-shattering. Big truths like this can be just mundane and almost routine.

“I really can’t do that,” Missandei says.

“Why not?”

“Because then he’d know,” Missy says, sounding blase about it — because she has thought about this a lot. “And then we’d have to do something about it. Either he tells me that he doesn’t feel the same way about me, and I get massively embarrassed about it and just fall off the face of the Earth in shame — or he tells me that he does feel the same way about me, and we start being together. We start doing all of the cuddling and smooching of my dreams. And then what? He grabs a boob one day, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, no! Not my boob!’” Missandei actually demonstrates this — sort of. She momentarily covers her boobs with a hand and her forearm.

“Missandei,” Olenna says patiently. “What does that mean?”

This is another thing Missy has been thinking a lot about. She says, “I think it means I’m not sure I feel like, sexually attracted to him. I feel a lot of emotional attachment, sure. Intellectual — hell yeah. Romantic attachment, yes — please refer to the part where I said I want to cuddle for hours with him. But sexual?” Here, she shrugs. “Like, do I want to take off my clothes in front of him and press our genitals together? I don’t think so. I am not sure I will ever get there. It’s almost like how I feel when I think about having sex with another woman. It’s like, I really love women. I really appreciate them, and they stimulate me mentally and emotionally. I _could_ cuddle with my friend Yara for hours on the couch if she would let me. But do I want to take off my clothes and mash our genitals together? I am not sure.”

Olenna raises a brow. “A penis matters this much to you? And I’m not judging. I am just asking.”

“I honestly didn’t think it did,” Missandei says. “But I don’t know. I just don’t know. And I feel like if I tell him about how I feel about him — I feel like I will lose him.”

 

 

  
It is a touch awkward to see her in the daylight — because she is really beautiful and this is something he tries not to remember about her. They kind of hug in greeting, with a lot of air between their bodies and his hands on her elbows. He offers to buy her coffee, but she insists on paying because she’s the one that asked him out for coffee.

She showed up dressed up — in a tight charcoal dress that causes her to gingerly climb onto the stool before she crosses her legs and dangles one electric blue pump out. She tells him she’s had client meetings all day.

He has shown up in loose jeans, a baseball cap, and a sweatshirt. He has kind of showed up like how he used to dress in high school actually. He wonders if this was a subconscious decision on his part.

Alayaya’s holding onto a latte that she purchased herself and after a short round of pleasantries, she tells him that she’s divorced now — she and her ex started divorce proceedings almost two years ago.

Grey tells her that he actually already knows this — he learned at some point through happenstance. Drogo may have flippantly mentioned it over the phone or something.

After the admission on both ends — that they both know this thing about her — they just stare at each other blankly for a long moment — and she’s first to break the stalemate. She tells him that while her marriage taught her a fair bit about relationships — the end of her marriage actually taught her a shit ton about relationships. One of the things she realized was that Grey treated her really well when they were together, and she was really immature, so she didn’t do right by him. He deserved far more than what he got from her. And for that, she is really sorry.

He was afraid of this. He really doesn’t want to rehash everything again. They’ve already done this with each other years before — brutally. They’ve already tearfully gone over past mistakes. They already mourned the fact that they found each other when they were too young. She already confessed to him that he was her first love and as a consequence, she had no one else to compare him to. She has already said she was sorry for cheating on him with a guy in possession of a full-fledged penis.

He tells her he doesn’t need to revisit this shittiness again. He says, “You’ve already said sorry. I already said I forgive. It’s in the past.”

She sighs. She says, “But I have more things to say about it. I’ve been thinking a lot about it.”

He says, “That’s cool. I don’t need hear it. But yeah, you’re getting a good look at me. You see I’m doing okay. You feel better?” He means that he doesn’t want to be the injured party _and_ also a salve for her. He’s pretty over that.

And she knows what he means — there are still so many things she remembers about him. She shakes her head. She says, “No, not at all.”

And here, he leans back in his chair and swings an arm behind him. He says, “I don’t know what to tell ya, man. Getting closure is sometimes a bitch.” After a brief pause — he flips the conversation a little bit. He lightens it. He says, “I was afraid that you were going to say, ‘Hey, Grey, I’m divorced now, and I want to give us another try.’”

She smiles at him — a dark smile that isn’t really a smile at all. It’s more an acknowledgement of how sometimes things don’t change. She holds up her hands around a pretend-rifle. She pretends to cock it. Then she says, “Shots fired,” as she shoots her pretend-rifle at him. She sees him smile. She says, “You warning me off of trying to fuck with you?”

“I mean, if that’s how you wanna interpret it . . .”

“Shut up,” she says. “Are you seeing someone right now?”

“Me? Nah,” he drawls. “I’m not dating right now. You’ve scarred me for life.”

“Oh, seriously?”

He snorts. He loudly says, “Oh my God, Yaya. You are so full of yourself that you actually believed that!”

“Bro, I’m trying to figure out if I’m gonna have an angry significant other trying to slash my face if I take you out to dinner sometime. You wanna grab a bite sometime? Since you live here now and all?”

He’s grinning — and again, it is not authentic. He says, “Sure. As long as you promise not to get drunk and try to have sex with me at the end of the night. I know how you roll.”

“See, you say things like that and I can’t tell if you want me to fuck with you or not.”

He shrugs casually. And then after a pause, he says, “This is a banger.” He’s pointing to invisible speakers. The song overhead is an Ed Sheeran knock-off with a guitar, singing about love or something like that.

 

 

  
All she said to Yara was that she would like to feel kind of like she is capable of running from rapists — and Yara took it to the one-hundredth level. Which makes sense — this is actually completely Missy’s own fault.

Yara teaches her how to wrap her hands — kind of. Yara prefaces the lesson with, “You aren’t going to remember this,” so Missandei actually takes that as permission to not pay very close attention to what Yara is doing and saying. Yara explains to her that wrapping is important because it protects her little baby bird bones when she throws hard punches.

Yara tells Missandei that Grey is actually very good at this. Missandei tells Yara that that’s a freaking shocker because Grey is typically known for being really bad at things requiring athleticism and eye-hand coordination.

Missandei can’t throw a decent punch. She is scared of the bag — of what, she isn’t sure. It’s not like the bag can bite back. She might be scared of hurting her hands. She just might be scared of her own power. She just keeps pulling her punches. She is sweating so much. It takes the entire lesson and workout until Yara acknowledges that, “It is coming along.”  
  
Missy feels _great_ about it, though. She feels _great_ that she was able to get through an hour and a half of being in a boxing gym with a bunch of cool people who actually know what they are doing. She is actually impressed at herself, that she was able to get through it without fixating too much on what people who are actually talented and capable must be thinking about her. She sardonically thinks that she might be able to run away from a rapist — one day.

They meet him for dinner. There’s no time to shower because they are running late. Her arms and hands and legs are sore and her skin is sticky and smelly from sweat and salt as she hugs him hello. He makes a big show of sniffing her because smelling each other has been integrated into the repertoire of stuff they do with one another. It makes her giggle. He says, “You haven’t showered. Like, at all.”

Then he hugs Yara and makes the same assessment. 

 

 

 


	18. Missy, Dany, and Yara make up. Sort of?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yara low-key wags her finger at Missandei for not wanting to fuck the future love of her life. Missandei goes NUTS about that because of course she does. Then, Missy, Dany, and Yara all discuss their shortcomings as people. Finally, future love of Missy's life comes over to make her dinner.

 

 

 

After Grey waves goodbye to them and ducks into his car, Yara knocks her shoulder hard into Missandei’s, making Missy stumble backwards a step and look at Yara in the face with shocked butt-hurtedness. Yara then says, “Hey, you guys fucking? Because that dinner we just had just right now? I dunno, babe. It just gave me the sense that you two are _fucking.”_

 _“Whaaat?”_ Missandei says in a high-pitched, strangled voice. She starts swallowing compulsively as her entire mouth dries up. She says, _“Nooo.”_ She looks really distraught and panicked.

Yara just waits it out. Yara is actually pretty sure that they aren’t actually fucking because Missandei is sexually basic as fuck — but dinner was ridiculous and Yara feels like she needs to gain something for participating in it, for being a victim of it. She has decided that she will take Missandei’s hysterical sense of shame as her prize.

Missy coughs into her closed fist. And then she swallows again. And then she is like, _“What!”_ and then she blinks rapidly. And then she swallows again. And then she says, “No! Oh my _God._ I don’t even think about him like that! What! Oh my God, _no!”_

“Okay, relax, _Irri,”_ Yara says sarcastically, holding up a hand. “I’m just kidding. And you’re heading into the icky territory where I start wondering if you might have an empathy deficiency.” And then Yara shoves her hands into her coat pockets, shoots Missandei just a really quick but incisive look, and then she rolls her eyes and mutters, “Poor Grey,” before she just starts walking in the direction of where her car is parked.

 

 

  
After that, Missandei goes through a miasma of conflicting emotions. She goes about her work week and her life with this thing in the back of her mind. She alternates between feeling deeply ashamed, feeling deeply guilty, and feeling deeply _angry._

She is deeply ashamed because anything having to do with sex shames her — obviously. She is also ashamed over how transparent she must be in how she feels about him — it is embarrassing. He probably knows that she’s fucking obsessed with him because _everyone_ can fucking tell that she is _fucking obsessed with him._

She feels deeply guilty because she has been _agonizing_ over whether Yara is right — about her having an empathy deficiency, about her being like Irri. Missandei does not have the guts to call up Yara and ask for some frank feedback, so naturally Missandei makes it all up in her head. She thinks that Yara has accused her of leading Grey on. She thinks that Yara is pissed that she is toying with his emotions just for the fun of it. She thinks that Yara thinks that _she_ is _bigot_ who hates queerness because she is just a terrible person who can’t relate to anybody who is different from her conventional hetero-cisnormative femaleness. Sometimes she feels really distraught and broken up over what Yara must think of her. Sometimes Missy feels like Yara is completely right and that she is just a terrible person.

And other times she wants to burn Yara’s face in a fucking _fire._ Because sometimes Missy just _knows_ that she _is_ empathetic and she is _not_ a bigot. She still thinks that it’s not so black and white as yes, she will fuck him, therefore she is a good person — and no, she will not fuck him therefore she _hates_ his body and what it’s all about. Also! She is a fucking Black female, so it is _really hilarious_ that a rich white woman is just making her feel like shit over something like this. It is actually some real fucking bullshit and that is why she wants to burn Yara’s face in _fire._

And then after that, Missandei often switches back to agonizing self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness.

 

 

  
Dany has impeccable timing because she asks Missandei out to brunch soon after. Dany makes it impossible to say no because Dany gives her a billion dates and times and also explicitly says, “I really miss you. I really want to see you.” It is like a punch in the face to Missandei.

So she meets the old gang for brunch for the first time in what feels like months. Brunch is usually a minefield of wheat gluten bombs for her, but Dany has done a lot of work researching to find a place that Missandei doesn’t have to just order a salad in. Because sometimes her best and only gluten-free options at restaurants are plates of greenery. Dany ends up torturing all of them — including Missy — by picking a really bougie vegan and gluten-free brunch place inhabited solely by a certain subset of whiteness. Everyone looks like they have a story about the time they went backpacking for six months through Essos. Like, Drogo is also this person.

He acts like he takes offense when she makes this observation casually to him. He holds his hand to his heart and he acts wounded about it. He says, “How dare you.”

She orders the eggs benedict — because it’s been seriously decades since she was dumb enough to order something that involves a muffin and hollandaise sauce — but the menu proclaims that the biscuits are gluten free, the egg is actually made of silken tofu, and the hollandaise is devoid of dairy.

She sees Dany's quiet smile to herself, when she listens to Missandei’s order, and Missy understands now, why Dany insisted on this place. Dany wanted her to have this — to be able to eat eggs benedict again.

Brunch is really polite, kind of careful, and a little bit bland. Yara and Irri are also still tiptoeing around each other. Yara is also not directly talking to Missandei at all — and Missy can’t tell if it’s something she started or if it’s Yara’s doing. Truth be told, she can’t look Yara in the face right now. She showed up, saw Yara, and just got all tense inside.

Drogo and Dany studiously avoid bringing up anything outside of soft observations about the food. Missy notices, for instance, that Tyrion wasn’t invited to brunch even though he usually would be. This is probably for Missandei’s benefit even though she’s not really in a fight with Tyrion. Actually — she’s actually probably in so many fucking fights with people that she has lost track of reality. She is actually probably in a fight with fucking everyone right now.

“How’s Obara?” Dany asks Yara, spreading jam over a piece of crumbly toast.

“She’s good,” Yara says. “Same ol’.”

“Cool,” Dany says, putting her knife down against the side of her plate. And then she shoves the toast piece into her mouth. She’s chewing as she turns her attention to Missandei. She asks, “How’s . . . your family?”

“They’re good. Just normal.”

And then Dany, full of great timing, rips it all apart. Dany’s face scrunches up in tension as her lower lip quivers momentarily. She starts to say, “Well —” before she stops herself. Drogo puts a hand on his wife’s arm — possibly in comfort or possibly because he’s trying to remind her to stop. But Dany often exhibits a certain sense of entitlement, hotheadedness, and impulsivity — as much as she tries to keep things cool. So Dany starts opening her mouth and just spilling out these thoughts that she’s been holding back. She is actually kind of really angry, too.

She tries to avoid putting the heat directly on Missandei. She tries to talk about it generally, in the third person. It is terribly awkward and weird because it’s so obvious who she is talking to. Dany tells the table that it is fucking hurtful when she gets freezed out, and she does not even know what the fuck she even did. She says that she thinks the respectful thing would be to actually get told what she has done wrong so that she gets a chance to rectify it and to apologize if she needs to apologize. She says, “It sucks to constantly get excuses about scheduling and being busy —”

“I _am_ busy,” Missandei says, cutting in, as her heart pounds from the stress of this. Dany gets pissed at lots of people — but she never gets pissed at Missandei.

Dany is also stressed — for the same reason. She says, “You were busy before, too, but you still made time for me. I know I’m not making this up in my head. I know I did something to upset you. What is it? What did I _do to you?”_

 _“This,”_ Missandei hisses. “You do _this._ You are oppressive sometimes. You apply a lot of pressure on people and you make them feel like they can’t ever say no to you. And I get that that trait is amazing, and you are a strongass lady — but I just wanted a _little bit_ of space from you, okay? Is that _not okay?”_

“You should’ve said something to me!” Dany says heatedly. “I can relax!” she snaps. “I can chill out! I can _handle_ it when people tell me no thanks!”

 

 

Brunch goes totally bananas. Missandei actually can’t take that Dany is essentially yelling at her in public like how Dany yells at everyone else who isn’t her in public. She can’t handle being the target of Dany’s ire and Dany’s intensive glaring.

So Missandei starts yelling back. Missy loudly says, “Oh my God, you are stressing me out right now, Daenerys!”

She tells them that she’s sick and tired of being treated like she’s fragile and weak. Dany’s jaw drops at that, and she is like, “Excuse me?” all dangerously like she feels so offended that the very idea is even being presented. Dany is actually offended because she has been Missandei’s fucking champion since day one, and this ingrate is now saying this crazy shit to her right now.

Drogo is looking around the restaurant blearily, either trying to see if other people are watching this shit go down or trying to test if this is his reality or if he is maybe in a nightmare. Irri is staring intently at the table. And Yara is just eating and watching the fight unfold.

Missandei tells Dany that the shit that went down at work was actually really terrible and really battered her self-esteem and how fucking safe she feels among people she _knows._ She is not a fighter like Yara and Dany are. She’s a fucking wound-licker. And she already feels bad about it so she didn’t need Dany being in her face and _fixing her life_ for her. Because Dany is always trying to fix her fucking life! And she thinks her life is perfectly fine! Dany doesn’t need to always watch her fucking diet all the time. Dany doesn’t need to make sure she is taking her medication on time. She can do these things herself. Missandei accuses Dany of treating her like a fucking child sometimes.

In response to all of this, Dany says, “Okay, good point. Those are good points.”

And then Dany accuses Missandei of being avoidant and being bad at confrontation. Dany tells Missandei that she was ironically a shit communicator despite knowing a gazillion languages. Despite knowing a gazillion languages, Missy couldn’t just text and been like: What up, bitch? I need to peace out for a little bit. Don’t worry. All is well.

Dany says, “It was _hurtful_ to just _lose you.”_

In response to this, Missandei says, “Okay, that’s really good feedback. I’m actually sorry about that. I didn’t think about it that way.”

And then because Missy has _so much adrenaline_ just coursing through her body right now, making her feel so motherfucking invincible — in the feelings — she randomly turns to Yara who is sitting next to her. And she says to Yara, “By the way — what you accused me of — is fucking _bullshit!”_

Yara looks all startled in her seat. She straightens up and then presses her hands to the table. She says, “Uh, can you remind me — what I accused you of? I don’t think I remember.” She stretches her mouth in bewilderment, exchanging a look with Drogo — something kind of like, OMG, what is up with these crazy bitches?

Drogo cuts eye contact. He wants no part of this.

Missandei tells Yara that she is not a bigot. Yara blinks in surprise and in confusion, says that she doesn’t remember accusing Missandei of being a bigot at all — what the fuck?

After a certain point, their nervous server scurries up to them and, ducking down apologetically, asks them if they could please be a little bit quieter — and Dany ends up automatically snapping at the poor guy — telling him that he cannot fucking tell them what to do. And then she pauses. And then she says to him, “Okay, so I heard that. I heard what that sounded like. And I apologize. We will keep it down.”

 

 

  
After lunch, they are all exhausted. Irri is exhausted from trying to stay invisible and out of the crossfire because Irri hates confrontation, too. Drogo is exhausted because he didn’t expect to force vegan food down his throat as a bunch of women just screamed all around him. If he wanted that, he’d just go home and visit his mom and sisters. Yara is exhausted because she did not know what a fucking rich inner life Missandei has, and she had stupidly forgotten how easily Missy’s feelings get hurt. Yara also didn’t realize she had hit such a _nerve,_ holy shit. Dany is exhausted because everyone was ganging up on her and her best friend was telling her that who she is is sometimes annoying and distasteful.

Missandei is exhausted because who even has the energy for this all the time? Fighting is exhausting.

The three of them all release a collective sigh before glomming together in a three-way hug.

To Dany, Missandei says, “I’m sorry I hurt you by avoiding you. I will be better at communicating with you from here on out. I will try harder to speak up.”

To Missandei, Dany says, “Thank you. And I will try to let go a little bit more. It’s just really hard for me to watch you struggle — but I will try to stop crawling up your butt.”

“Thank you so much.”

To Missandei, Yara says, “I’m sorry too, babe. I didn’t mean to make you think that _I_ think you are bigot just because you won’t fuck Grey. I mean, we all have our own reasons for not fucking that guy.”

Missandei’s face burns. Because this is really the first time this is coming out in front of other people so explicitly. Taking a page out of the feedback she’s been given at brunch, she says, “Yara, it embarrasses me when you tell my secrets to other people in such a cavalier way.”

“You not wanting to fuck him is a secret?” Yara asks. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I am realizing that I have a bad feel for this stuff.”

 

 

  
When he shows up at her apartment, he shows up wearing casual clothing, with a heavy bag full of groceries. He also shows up wearing thick-rimmed, black-matte glasses. He smiles at her as he bends down a little bit, so that it’s easier for her to throw her arms around his shoulders briefly. Then he is pushing his way into her place. He goes to the kitchen and starts unloading bags of vegetables — greens, yams, garlic, onion, herbs, a single apple — and _then_ he also pulls out frozen poultry and drops it into her sink with a thunk. It makes her blink because it looks so intense. She usually doesn't do all of this to feed herself. He looks at her as he turns on her faucet and starts running water. He’s grinning as he states the obvious. He says, “This shit is still fucking frozen. It was the only kind available. I figured we’re not in a crazy rush to eat, right? You aren’t starving, right?”

She smiles back and him and mutely shakes her head no — she’s not in a rush to eat.

He’s got a knife in one hand, slashing through plastic and tearing it off with his other hand. He snaps the encasement off and wrings it sort of clean of duck water. He opens her garbage bin with his elbow and then he dumps the plastic in there.

Then he’s trying to reach into the bird’s cavity to extract a sauce packet, gizzards, liver, and a heart. He says to her, “Motherfuck, I love duck so much, oh my God.” And then, after fisting the duck proves to be unsuccessful because its insides are just completely iced up, Grey says, “So this is really frozen. Dammit. So — I have question for you. How big of a deal is food safety to you?”

She is still smiling like a fucking lunatic at him, as she watches him futz with the bird. She says, “Um, very?”

He considers her answer for a moment. And then he slowly says, _“Okay._ Good to know.”

“You’re wearing glasses,” she finally observes. “I didn’t know you wear glasses.”

“Okay _, sort of,”_ he corrects, his voice dry and low. It signals to her that he’s about to launch into some pointlessly strong stance on a really mundane thing. “I actually have twenty-twenty vision. Like, it’s almost perfect. _But,_ I do wear glasses when I have to stare at screens for like, more than six hours straight. The prescription is super light, and they kind of relax my eyes so I don’t get tension headaches at the end of the day. I still have near-perfect vision, Missandei,” he says. “It’s just like, the difference between high def and like, 4k. I think we both can agree that sometimes 4k is overkill. I’m wearing my glasses ‘cause we’re watching a movie, and I actually plan on staying awake this time. Is that okay? Oh my God, what is with the interrogation already?” He’s laughing now — at her or at himself, she can’t tell.

“I like them,” she says quietly. “They make you look smarter.”

“Okay, that’s a little racist,” he mumbles, washing his hands in the other sink basin. “But I’m gonna let it slide. Hey, can I get a drink? What do you have?”

“Organic wine.”

“Oh my God, I love organic wine. Pour it out, man.” And then right after — he laughs again — loudly. He looks at her with his eyes bugged out. He says, “Why are you _staring?_ Is there something on my face?”

 

 

 

 


	19. Missy is a leader now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy graduates from leadership school and feels really scrutinized as everyone makes her prove her ability to be a leader to them! The future love of her life might be looking at another woman?! Uh oh.

 

 

 

  
There is a casual luncheon held to celebrate “graduating” from the leadership program. They are meant to invite their friends and family to the picnic to bask in this achievement. Although it’s not a new type of conundrum for her, Missandei still generally marvels at how easily other people take this task in stride. Rebecca tells them that her parents are very far away, and they probably won’t fly in for this, but her boyfriend will. Vincent says, “Ooh! We’re going to finally meet him!” Vincent also says his wife and kids will be attending.

Missandei is too embarrassed to invite her parents because she doesn’t know if they will behave in public and they are also intensely awkward around Westerners they don’t know, so people who aren’t her dad’s former bosses and coworkers. It’s probably where she learned her own social awkwardness.

She casually tries to throw this event out to her brothers, whose schedules are always a little bit up in the air, depending on how much they are trying to change shifts in order to accommodate a family obligation. Missandei worries that this “graduation” and just her in general isn’t enough to inspire her brothers to change shifts.

Actually, a lot of time is spent just on explaining what is happening. She has to explain to Moss and Mars that it’s leadership training tailored to women of color, but men attend the program because they benefit from it, too. Like, they want to learn more about what their women of color team members go through in their workplace. Similarly, white people attend the training for the same reason.

“Wow,” Mars says. “And your work sent you to this? That’s wild.”

She takes it to mean that he thinks she’s not leadership material. And . . . that is probably right. Though it stings just a little bit extra because he just learned he passed his sergeant exam, so he’s kind of basking in that. Her oldest brother is definitely leadershippy.

“Do you know if the PD has this type of training for women?” Mars asks, his arms crossed, looking over at Moss.

“No idea,” Moss says. “Probably?”

“Should look into it,” Mars says.

Moss turns his attention back to Missy. His face is blank for slow moment, before it creeps into a sneaky smile. It makes her frown deepen, as she braces herself for it.

He says, “So. Are you a leader now? Are you large and take-charge now? What things have you learned? Teach us something, leader.”

 

 

  
So she has a larger showing than she ever expected. Dany and Drogo show up — she didn’t even invite Drogo, but clearly Dany is forcing him to come along. Tyrion also randomly shows up, probably having heard about this from the program coordinators because he was the one that recommended her to the program. Grey shows up, because of course he does — she told him there would be free food. But most surprising of all is that _both_ Mars and Moss show up.

Her cheeks are hot when she sees them walk up in the distance, just two humongous sentinels in the sun, slowly making their way toward the gaggle of people standing around picnic tables. There’s also something else — a certain terrible kind of connection that exists between siblings where they always know just the right and worst thing to say to her.

When Moss gets up close enough to see her face clearly, he says to Mars, “Oh my God, she is so touched we are here that she is about to cry.”

Mars latches onto this right away. She actually isn’t close to crying at all, but they are assholes and they are trying to embarrass her. And it is working. Mars says, “Oh my God, this bitch loves us and cares about our opinion of her _so much.”_

She still walks into their hugs.

 

 

  
She quickly regrets inviting her brothers — just a little bit — because like with every other arena in life, they command attention. Beyond being intimidatingly big, tall, handsome, and dark-skinned — they are also confident, charismatic, and funny. And she is often the ass in all of their stand up material.  
  
Generally, people tend to be interested in the fact that they are cops because people like to ask them if they’ve ever shot and killed someone before. But people of color are _extra interested_ in the fact that they are cops, so their new fan club starts asking them a bunch of questions about how they feel about the claims of police brutality, why internal investigations into misconduct aren’t more transparent, body cams, how they feel when they pull over a car, if they ever feel profiled when they are off-duty, whether they hold their own racial biases that maybe causes them to also racially profile people when they are on-duty, and whether they think they personally experience racial discrimination from their colleagues and the higher ups at the PD.

She actually hasn’t seen them answer these sorts of questions before — because these questions typically don’t get asked like this — so she is actually shocked at how thoughtfully and comprehensively they answer the questions. She is _shocked_ when she sees Mars shift into professional presentation mode, straightening up and giving contextual information and defining terms before he launches into explanation. She is shocked when she sees Moss take a break from nodding along to supplement Mars with information from a freaking _study_ that “just came out.”

And then it all kind of reverts later. Later, she realizes that she’s not really getting the best parts of her brothers when Mars sees Grey, nods at him in greeting, and says, “Hey, if it isn’t the guy who fucks.”

Moss claps Grey on the back, jarring him, and rubs his hat-covered head. Moss says, “This guy fucks!” And then more somberly, Moss also says, “Missandei is _obsessed_ with this motherfucker. She is like, always low-key name-dropping him.”

Fucking _kill her right now._

 

  
She can’t eat a whole hell of a lot at the potluck, besides salad and chicken wings, which were made special for her — a whole tray was made just for her, different from the other tray full of breaded wings. She feels guilty about putting people out enough that she starts cramming her face with chicken so that it is worth it for everyone.

“Is it good?” Tyrion asks, walking up to her with a soda before he sits down on the grass next to her.

“It’s pretty good,” she says, with her mouth full.

And then he launches right into it. Without preamble, he says, “I’m really sorry, Missandei.” He also adds specificity, because he’s been thinking a lot about why he’s been feeling like his apologies have fallen short. He says, “I didn’t speak up for you — and I should have. And not because you’re my friend, but because it was the right thing to do. I prioritized my own relationships with these people, and I told myself what was happening was not a big deal because what was happening was normal. That was really fucked up.”

She sighs, because this isn’t the first time he has apologized to her and attempted to smooth things over. She has refrained from explicitly saying the words “I forgive you” because she just doesn’t feel right about it. She doesn’t want for her to say the words and for him to think that it’s okay — even though it kind of is. She just doesn’t want for him to think that she’s okay — even though she mostly is.

She actually just doesn’t want him to forget that this happened. She worries that telling him she forgives him and being his friend again will allow him to forget that this happened. She might just need more time.

In therapy, she and Olenna have talked about how apologies sometimes feel great to receive because sometimes it’s just all she wants from a person. Like, if she ever heard an apology from her dad — like, even for taking the last chicken wing at dinner — she would probably start spontaneously sobbing before she throws a party over it.

And sometimes it feels like apologies serve only the other person. Sometimes insistent apologies just kind of re-traumatizes her. Sometimes she feels pressured to be gracious and to accept the apology even though it all still feels incomplete to her. She has told Olenna she is really tired of being gracious all the time. It’s not even that she’s fed up with it — she is literally tired. It is just energy draining.

She says, “Tyrion, look, I appreciate you expressing this to me. I know you feel bad. I’m sorry you feel bad. But you don’t have to keep telling me that you feel bad. It . . . causes me stress when we harp on this too much.”

 

 

  
Rebecca’s boyfriend is not as awkward and weird and spectrum-y as Rebecca led them to believe. He actually seems like a typical tech nerd — and Missy is really familiar with his type. She understands the cadence of his attempts at joking — and she smiles encouragingly at him to try and help him along.

He’s also super confident verging on arrogant — again, not atypical for his type — so she’s not all that stunned when he casually tells them all that when he and Rebecca marry, they are going to wait a few years before having children.

What is kind of surprising is the way that Rebecca kind of recoils when she hears this. And when Missy sees this, it just makes her want to scream out _why in the world_ Rebecca is with _this dude._

 

  
There’s a short program at the picnic. The program runners gather all of their attentions and make them do super cute and corny stuff like line up to get their “diplomas” which are really just certificates of completion and a coffee shop gift card. The program runners also think it’s a really good idea for each of them to share one thing they got out of the program that they will take with them going forward.

Missandei is so terrible at this kind of stuff. She is inexplicably terrible at things that come very, very easy to other people. She is fine presenting work or presenting facts at work, but she is really bad at talking about herself and getting a little personal in a public forum. She is also bad at coming up with talking points on the fly. She needs hours of preparation before she can say something cogent.

So she starts racking her brain for something to say that sounds smart. And she handicapped herself because _of course she did._ She was reluctant and slow to line up — so she is at the end of the freaking line — so everyone in front of her is stealing all of the obvious yet still poignant things to say.

She hears a lot of whooping and hollering when she gets to the front of the line — from her brothers. She is the very last person to go. Everyone is probably real tired of watching this shit and listening to impromptu speeches. Her brothers are completely embarrassing because they know that this shit is small and minor and they are blowing it up so that she feels embarrassed. She pretty much wants to crawl into a hole and die right now.

“So, interesting story about Missandei,” Diane, the program runner says. “When she first came into the program, she was very quiet and shy. She didn’t say very much during the first few training sessions. So I pulled her aside and I asked her if everything was okay and if she was getting enough out of the training. Missy said to me, ‘I’m not quiet because I am not liking the training. I am quiet because I just don’t think I have something meaningful to add.’ Well, fast forward six months later, and Missy is speaking up a lot in the training sessions and she was instrumental in getting her group to finish their team project! Everyone give Missy another hand!”

Awesome. Fucking shit, this is the worst.

 

 

  
Dany insists on taking her out after the picnic to celebrate. Missandei is still smarting from the public expression of her very, very modest gains, so she really just wants to go home and nap. But Dany is pushy and still has a hard time extracting herself from Missandei’s butt. Dany still tells her that they _have to_ celebrate.

Missandei points out that they just ate, and she is stuffed. Dany counters that by saying that they can go grab some drinks then. Because she has run out of things to say and because she’s kind of emotionally drained, Missandei relents and says okay. She vows to herself that she will be stronger the next time this sort of thing comes up. She tells herself it’s all a work in progress.

She asks Grey and her brothers if they want to come along. Her brothers both say they can’t — they have other things to do. Moss has to go home and take over with the kids so his wife can get a break from them. Mars gripes has to go to the second half of Kaden’s soccer game even though that kid is just fucking terrible.

Grey vaguely tells her that he has plans, but he can catch up with her later if she’s up for it. She straight up asks him if it’s Drogo. He takes in a deep breath and quietly tells her it’s a little bit Drogo, but he really does have plans.

When she goes to hug all of them goodbye, both of her brothers really just hug the shit out of her and tell her that they love her and they are proud of her. It is really cute, and she loves these assholes so much, too.

When she makes a move to hug Grey, Moss immediately says, “She has such a fucking hard-on for this motherfucker.”

And she immediately freezes and drops her arms as the hug dies on the spot. She feels helpless and hopeless. She fucking hates Moss. She is loud and petulant-sounding as she screeches out, “Oh my God, would you _please stoppp!”_ as her brothers start cracking up.

Grey chuckles a little bit — at her mortification — and he reaches out for her. He wraps his arms around her as he tells her, “It’s okay. It’s okay. Ignore them.” He’s rubbing her back soothingly as he tells her, “This is the response they want from you. Just relax.”

She drops her head so that her forehead knocks against the crook of neck. It is just so terrible because this shit from him is just _the best shit ever._

 

  
She works on her one drink with gusto — it is a dry martini because she might be a dry martini kind of lady now? She finds that sometimes she gets so deep down a path that it ends up looping around itself again. She is so humiliated on so many different fronts that she just feels fucking bulletproof right now.

“So, you and Grey, huh?” Dany says lightly, reclining a little bit in her chair with a pink drink — Missandei has forgotten what Dany has ordered.

“He’s so fucking amazing, and he smells _so yummy_ all the time,” Missandei says miserably. Because why even fucking lie? “I want to buy his shampoo and soap, but I’m too nervous to ask him what kind he uses.”

“Oh my God,” Dany whispers into the rim of her glass. “So fucking _cute._ So the thyroid medicine is working.”

Missandei laughs humorlessly. She says, “Yeah, the thyroid medicine is working.”

“I thought . . . you didn’t want to fuck him?” Drogo says carefully. He is drinking a beer.

“I don’t think I do,” Missandei says, equally as carefully because she’s still so scared of sounding like a bigot. She understands that people are protective of Grey — Drogo especially. So she explains. She says, “It’s a little complicated because of my history and his history and just like — I don’t know exactly how I feel about him, beyond wanting his shampoo so I can smell him even when he’s not around like a fucking psychopath. And for the record, guys — he hasn’t like, offered any sex to me. Like, at all. Like, he’s been — like, this is not even on the table for us. I’m just like — ahhh — just going a little nutty because we’ve gotten so close in a short amount of time, and I think I’m getting confused about it. But like, we’re just friends. He’s friendly. But you know, he’s friendly with like, everyone.”

“I know he likes you,” Drogo offers. “It’s been a while since I’ve talked to him, but he has said nice things about you in the past.”

Then Drogo finds that he is coming up blank when he tries to think of examples. Drogo blinks and stares off in the distance, as he sifts through his memory bank.

He has blocked out their fight for the sake of just moving the fuck on, but Drogo does remember Grey angrily telling him that Grey has nothing in common with Missandei. He also remembers Grey angrily telling him that he was always pushing women and sex onto Grey, as if the two things would erase the terrible thing he has done to Grey.

That condemnation really cut to his core. He really believed it and he really internalized it. Even though they aren’t really talking, Drogo thinks he can still start right now — in being a better friend to Grey. He can start right now, in being less self-serving.

This is why Drogo says, “Actually, to be honest. He’s told me he’s not at all interested in dating anyone. He’s pretty content with like, being on his own for a bit.” Drogo clears his throat. “Just — FYI, you know. But it’s nice that you guys have been spending time together and are becoming good friends.”

“Okay, so I don’t agree with that,” Dany says flatly. “I think you two should try and date each other. I think you two are very compatible and cute together.”

“Dany,” Drogo says, looking over at his wife with a certain kind of intensity. He is checking her. Drogo _rarely_ checks his wife. “Remember? You need to bring it down by _a lot,_ babe. Let her just live her life, shit.”

“I’m just offering an opinion,” Dany says, taking another sip from her drink.

“Just keep your opinion to yourself sometimes, man.”

 

 

  
He goes over to her place because she asked him to. He has to spend a little bit of time examining, within himself, the reason he is doing this. He has to figure out if it’s a situation, like in the past, in which she beckons for him and he just goes running to her — or if he’s just being a friend.

He also has to figure out what he wants from her — whether it is nothing, friendship, or eventually something more. He has to figure out if he feels a certain way only because it is kind of safe, and he already knows what it feels like to be with her. He has to figure out if he is just prone to defaulting.

He knows that no decisions have to be made right now — as she opens the door smiling at him. He hugs her hello, and he asks, “So, point me to it.”

She leads him out to the garage — of the house that she used to own with her ex-husband. She has told Grey that she’s finally at the point where she feels like she has the time and the energy to completely end this era of her life. And the market is better now. She is going to sell this house.

There is a strip of black mold from when her laundry room flooded. She told him that the look of it completely scares the shit out of people, so she’d like to remove it.

He says, “Oh, that’s not so bad.”

Alayaya says, “Grey, it looks bonkers to me — a person with an untrained eye.”

 

 

 

 

 


	20. Who is peeing on the toilet?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey gets framed for peeing on the toilet. Missandei discovers gluten-free movie theater popcorn. Grey can't handle how adorable the future love of his life is. It blows up in his face.

 

 

 

 

Grey has no idea how this is happening — if there is some phantom pisser in the house — because over breakfast with his folks, his mom brings up an old topic again. She puts some eggs down in front of him and she asks him to please be more careful when he is peeing or to clean up more carefully after himself because she does not want to keep walking into the guest bathroom and finding dried splashes of yellow on the lid and around the bowl.

It is utterly impossible that it is him, because he is insanely anal retentive about never leaving a trace of himself behind after peeing. He is super careful about _how_ he pees, in order to keep it as clean as possible. He either squats or he sits on the toilet and creates a seal with his ass so that no urine escapes.

He tells his parents as much — that it’s not him.

“Excuse me,” his dad says. “If it’s not you, then are you saying it’s me? Because it’s certainly not me. I don’t even _use_ the guest bathroom that much.”

“No, I’m not saying it’s you,” Grey tells his dad. “I’m just saying that it’s not me.”

“Do the math, Nudho. There are two of us in this house that pee standing up. Sort of. It’s not your mom. You say it’s not you. So are you saying it’s me?” His dad sighs. “Why are you _lying_ about this? It’s not that big of a deal. Just fucking knock it off and be more considerate. You’re too old to still have your mother cleaning up your urine.”

“It’s not —”

“It’s utterly ridiculous that we’re having an argument about this,” his dad cuts in. “Just fucking stop doing it, Jesus Christ!”

And Grey thinks that the stupid argument is done — and he also thinks that it’s just like any other stupid squabble that they have — but then his dad gets on a roll. It is as if the soft little detente that Grey was given because of his breakup with Drogo and the three minutes of fun they had brewing beer together before his dad completely took over never happened or didn’t matter enough. His dad starts bringing up all of this old shit. His dad asks him what he is doing with his life — and Grey resents being talked to like he is Azzie. He refrains from reminding his dad that he had a really great and fulfilling career that he walked away from — he had a nice apartment full of his own shit that he had to pack up — to come back _here,_ to _this._ He refrains from bringing it up because the deal is that his dad can bitch as much as he wants about Grey — about how he is just a waste of potential, how he is getting too old to still be the way he still is — and Grey is not allowed to reciprocate unless he wants his dad to freak out over how disrespectful he has become.

So he has to sit there and listen as his dad chews him out for still being a fucking child. He is a thirty-one-year-old man who just won’t grow up the fuck up. He sits there as his mom bites her tongue and just doesn’t defend him because maybe she doesn’t even see the value in his efforts herself.

His eggs have gone cold. He stands up from the table. He says, “Do you want me to move out, then? Is it just a good time to take a break from each other?”

 

 

  
He starts spending more time out of the house, for three reasons. His dad is a fucking asshole. His mom is his dad's enabler and hypewoman. And he wants his parents to stumble onto a mess on the toilet and not have him be around for them to fucking blame.

He starts putting in a few extra hours at work every few days. He starts going to the gym more often. He starts hanging out with his friends even more than he has been. He tells Yaya what his master plan is, and she shakes her head at him and reminds him that he will just never win against his dad. She also asks him if he’s really sure he’s not the culprit. He tells her, “No! It's not me!” but she casts enough doubt in him that he starts actually taking before and after photos of toilets on his phone so that he can compare objectively. After about three days of this, he concludes that it’s not him. It’s everyone else. He’s a really clean pee-er.

He starts boxing more with Yara. Because he likes to pretend that he is just beating the shit out of his dad’s face sometimes. He hits hard, over and over again, beyond the point of pain, as salt seeps into his eyes and burns.

For half an hour, without any breaks, they stay in close range of each other to keep a continuous flow of punching. At a point, he throws a combo that lands on her because she didn’t see it coming. Her eyes flash at him, and then he throws the same combo again — to help her develop a counter for it — and he repeats it over and over until the sixth time, when she is countering it perfectly. She gives him a big smile when it happens.  
  
His knuckles are raw and split open from bag work when he takes off his wraps. He’s actually silent when he uncovers the wet blood — she’s the one who hisses in sympathy pain for him. She touches his hands and says, “You _idiot.”_

Yara tells him that she has to go meet a friend for dinner, but she tries to make him promise her that he will stop off at the pharmacy to buy first aid supplies. She lectures him on taking care of himself, on going home and putting his hands in some ice. She forgets that his dad is a doctor and there are plenty of medical supplies hanging out under bathroom sink basin in the guest bathroom.

He puts gauze over his cuts and wraps them up sloppily before he rushes to his car because he is running late. The steering wheel feels cushioned underneath his bandages and he suppresses a few yawns as he speeds to the movie theater.

There, Missandei greets him with a great big smile. He feels some of the tension inside of himself from the last few days loosen. He feels boneless as he smiles back at her, as he wearily drags himself over to her. She cheerfully asks him if he wants popcorn — she just learned that this theatre’s popcorn is gluten-free and dairy-free. She never thought to even ask before, but because she arrived early today, she had time to kill so she just randomly asked the concession stand cashier when he wasn’t too busy. She claps her hands together, bounces on her feet, and squeezes out this squeal of delight — and Grey wants to laughingly ask her why the fuck she even waited for him when she already knows the answer in her heart. Just get the fucking popcorn. He thinks about how she has this uncanny ability to just cheer him the fuck up so effortlessly.

She’s too excited about her new discovery, so she doesn’t notice his introspective mood, the bandages on his hand — and the fact that he’s started to bleed through. She just twirls in place and tells him that she’s heard really good things about the movie, that she isn’t sure whether or not to get a Cherry Coke or an orange soda.

He reclines his sore body in his seat when they settle in. He puts their soda in the cup holder in between them as she leans in with her bucket of popcorn. She eagerly whispers to him and tells him to take some. He softly smiles at her in the dark and tells her maybe later.

He shuts his eyes for a moment when the previews come on — and it feels too good. He has to fight to open his eyes back up. He already knows he’s going to fall asleep on her. He is sleep-deprived. As Yara said to him earlier — he is kind of bad at taking care of himself.

 

 

  
He jolts awake when the end credits music starts blaring and people start rising from their seats and filtering out the exits. He blearily straightens in his seat and finds that she’s holding his hand. He swallows, wetting his dry throat — he wonders if he’s been snoring or something. Then he looks at her.

She says, “You’re bleeding.”

 

 

  
She’s kind of annoyed with him for falling asleep during yet _another_ movie — not because it wastes money and she feels kind of abandoned whenever he passes out and they are in public — but because he is bleeding and smells like he just came from the gym and he is clearly very, very tired. She doesn’t understand why he didn’t just text her to ask for a raincheck so that he can go home and rest up.

His restless nap in the movie theater didn’t energize him as much as it just whetted his appetite for more sleep. He keeps yawning and trying to take his hand back. He keeps telling her that it’s fine.

She actually has a first aid kit in her car — she tells him that it’s just smart because emergencies happen all the time. He tells her that actually, emergencies don’t actually happen all the time — just sometimes. He’s so fucking tired that he doesn’t even know why he is taking a stance on this dumb shit at all, but he does let her lead him to her car in the parking lot.

It is raining, so after retrieving the first aid kit from her trunk, they climb into the front and passenger seats. She hits on the overhead lights and starts mutely squeezing a little bit of hand sanitizer into her hands, rubbing it all over. Then she extracts a pair of latex gloves from her tin.

“Oh,” he says dully, voice slow and thick. “I don’t have any communicable blood diseases.”

“Oh,” she says slowly. “Okay. That’s good to know.”

“I mean, it’s good for you to wear gloves regardless. That’s a good habit. But I’m saying — you won’t die if there is a hole in that glove.”

“Grey,” she says, finally smiling at him a little bit now. “You’re such a charmer.”

 

 

  
She carefully and slowly dismantles his shitty bandage work and makes a soft girly sound when she sees his raw knuckles. It kind of reminds him of the sound Yara made when she saw his knuckles, but also not. He silently watches her furrow her brows in concentration as she thinks about how to attack this. He thinks that she is so fucking adorable sometimes. She also starts applying way too much concentration toward ripping open alcohol wipes. He thinks it’s so fucking cute, how carefully she touches his hands, because she doesn’t want to cause him more pain.

He kind of loves the way she jumps in fright, when he scares her on purpose by shouting out loudly when she touches an alcohol wipe to his knuckles.

Her eyes are horrified, and she says, “Oh my God! I’m so sorry, Grey! Are you okay!”

He laughs in her face. His laugh comes from deep in his belly, and it feels like he hasn’t gotten in air that deep in a long while. He says, “Yeah, I’m totally fine. It doesn't hurt that much.”

Her face twists and morphs into anger when she realizes that she has been fucked with — again. He honestly keeps doing it because she’s so freaking gullible about it. He keeps doing it because he likes watching her response to it. She raises her fist at him and then brings it down, pretty softly, so that it lightly smacks against his shoulder.

He dramatically says, “Ow!”

She says, “Shut up! You’re the worst!” as she starts wiping up some of the dried blood from around his cuts.

 

 

  
She slathers on a pretty thick layer of antibiotic ointment on him before she lays fresh pieces of gauze over both of his hands. And then she carefully rolls long strips of breathable gauze over his knuckles, stopping every now and then to ask him how it feels — if it feels too tight or too loose. He tells her that it feels just fine.

When she finishes, she quickly cleans up and dumps scraps, his old bloodied bandages, and her latex gloves into separate plastic baggies. She tells him he can go home and wash the bandages. She rubs his fingertips in her bare hands, possibly trying to get his circulation going, as she tells him that his bloodied bandages are reusable.

He extracts his hands from hers so that he can reach up and hold her entire face in his palms. He can only feel her smooth skin at the heels of his hands and his fingertips — nowhere else. He softly rubs her cheekbones with his thumbs. She is staring at him — a little dazed, a little bewildered and confused. He can hear the steady pitter patter of rain over their heads. And then he says, “Thank you. That was really nice.”

She doesn’t move out of his hands though. He thinks that this must be a good sign, that it probably means something positive. Her eyes do flicker with a little bit of tension real quickly, before she tells him, “You didn’t need to push yourself to come out if you were hurt and tired.” She further admonishes him by saying, “You should’ve just gone home to rest. I would’ve understood.”

“I really wanted to see you though,” he says softly.

She blinks rapidly at that. She presses her lips together tightly and shakes her head imperceptibly. He takes it to mean that she does not believe him.

So he quietly says her name. He says, “Missandei, can we try something?”

She immediately looks panic-stricken. He’s used to this enough from her that it doesn’t concern and frustrate him as much as it used to. He now sees this as a part of her mental process. She says, “What do you want to try?”

He says, “I think you know what.”

She appears to think about it — for long seconds. He breathes through it. He’s actually thinking, fuck it. He’s actually thinking that his self-enforcement fucking amounts to nothing. He’s actually thinking that doing the right thing all the time doesn’t even fucking matter. He’s actually thinking that, as hard as he tries to be _good,_ it does not even fucking matter. He’s also thinking that he can probably stand to lose her, if it came down to it.

“Okay,” she says softly, as she quickly draws her lips in and smears them together. That’s how he knows that she knows.

So he kisses her.

His lips touch hers very softly — like a breathy, warm pillow. Her eyes are partially open as it happens, so she can see it happening in slow motion. She only shuts her eyes as her heart starts to pound and throb in her ears, as her face starts to burn and as tears prick the back of her eyes.

His hands press into her face just a little bit more firmly, as he gently angles her head a little bit, so that his mouth locks over hers more comprehensively.

He kisses her gently and pretty chastely. He presses his lips to hers and puckers a little bit, holding it, before he retreats. He doesn’t shove his tongue into her mouth like what she was assuming he’d do — in her mental preparation for the possibility of this outcome.

When he pulls away, he’s still holding onto her face. He expels this breath he’s been holding in. He asks, “Are you okay?” He asks that because she was utterly frozen the entire two seconds he was kissing her.

She nods quickly and nervously, signalling to him that she is okay. She bites her lips — the ones that he just kissed — and she swallows the lump in her throat as her heart slams insistently against her rib cage.

He clears his throat. He lets go of her face. He actually turns away from her a little bit and sinks back against the passenger seat. He tiredly rubs his eyes. And then he says, “I’m sorry.” He says, “Do you want to talk about it?”

 

 

  
He shrugs out of his wet jacket before he opens the front door. He toes off his sneakers on the front stoop. These actions are ingrained in him, because he doesn’t want to track rain and mud into his parents' house.

He expects to get a little bit of silent treatment, because that’s generally how these things go for a while. They give each other some space until they get over this stupid repetitive, ridiculous shit.

But as he walks through the foyer in his damp socks, his mom intercepts him at the hallway with a spatula in her hand. She is wearing an apron. She is smiling warmly at him. She says, “Hey, baby. I’m making cookies.”

“Sanaa, you left the oven open,” his dad mutters, rounding the corner. And when he sees Grey, his dad says, “Oh, it’s you.”

Awesome. Grey stops himself from rolling his eyes.

Then his dad says, “Grey, Jack is the one who’s been pissing all over the toilet. I am fucking sorry, son. I am a fucking asshole. We figured it out today during dinner with the Okafors.” Jack is the grandson of his parents’ good friends, his dad’s former colleague. And then before Grey can respond to this, his dad says, “Son, what happened to your hands?” already reaching for Grey’s nearest hand.

And before he can even respond to _that,_ his mom’s eyes wrinkle up in concern, and she says, “Baby, are you okay?”

“Nudho?” his dad asks.

He sniffs. He extracts his hand from his dad’s grasp so that he can reach up and touch his eyes. He wipes them quickly. He sharply exhales. He’s trying to clear his head. He sniffs again. And then he says, “Um, let me go put my stuff away. And then I’ll uh, come out and check out these cookies.”

 

 

 

 

 


	21. Grey has a support system

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After getting his heart busted by the future love of his life, Grey just tries to move on. Aww.

 

 

 

 

His dad goes on an entire journey as he undoes Missandei’s bandage job and looks over Grey’s hands at the kitchen table. His mom is filling up water bags with ice cubes and water at the sink. His dad tells him this insanely convoluted story about this girl who nearly destroyed him because her dad didn’t approve of him and she didn’t fight it, but she was still always sneaking out to see him and giving him hope. Grey has to cut into the story to ask if his dad is talking about Mom and Grandpa because his grandfather wasn’t the biggest fan of his dad — and Grey’s dad tells him that this story _isn’t_ about Grey’s mom and to stop interrupting. His dad tells him that the moral isn’t to persist after a woman crushes him underneath her foot. The moral is just to move the fuck on — and then later, he will meet a woman like his mom, who is legit.

His mom is rolling her eyes through this lesson and as Grey’s dad says, “Well, not _just_ like your mom. It would be fucked up if you end up with a woman who is _just like_ your mother. I would wonder where we went wrong there. Not a comment on you, Sanaa.”

“You’re so funny,” his mom says in a deadpan.

Then, his dad tells him that they used to box in the military — he was cleaning these kinds of abrasions a lot in his downtime. His dad doesn’t talk about his time in the military much — he says because there’s not a whole lot to tell. It was a job. Grey once tried to do a report on this and made the fatal mistake of calling his father a war hero to his face. His dad told him that he’s not fucking hero. He was a medic who looked at a lot of dicks and gave guys pills so that their dicks would not fall off from the excessive fucking of prostitutes. His dad told him to pick a new report subject, unless Grey thought his teacher and classmates would really enjoy watching a fifth-grader do a presentation on sexually transmitted infections.

His dad also tells Grey that he didn’t realize Grey was boxing. It’s not one of those comments like is like, oh, how dare you keep secrets. It’s more like a soft admission that he might not know enough about his kid. These hands are telling a story. As did the crying. Actually, the crying told most of the story.

Grey sighs. He says, “Dad —”

“Forget that bitch, son.”

“Kamau!” his mom says, smacking his dad in the shoulder — because she really loves it whenever his dad calls women bitches.

“Dad,” Grey says patiently, trying again. “I didn’t get emotional because someone rejected me. I got emotional because I walked into this house and you guys were being really nice to me, and you apologized to me, Dad. That was like, crazy. I’m going to have to call Azzie and tell him about it later.”

“What are you talking about? I always apologize to you guys,” his dad grumbles pulling Grey’s bare hand up to his face, squinting behind his glasses. “And there’s no shame in crying, son. It doesn’t make you less of a man.”

“Um, I know?”

“Okay, you’re done,” his mom says, grabbing Grey’s wrist and pulling it out if his dad’s grasp.

 

 

  
His dad protests when his mom takes over with his hands. His dad asks her if she’s a doctor too now. His mom snaps at his dad and tells him that she doesn’t need to be a doctor to clean up superficial scrapes. His dad tells her that the superficial scrapes could get infected and spread through Grey’s body, just shutting him down and killing him. Both Grey and his mom think this is a wild overstatement.

She carefully bandages him back up and then places the two icy water bags over his knuckles. She shoves a cookie into his mouth as she stands up to go pour him a glass of milk. She puts a straw in it so that he can drink it without his hands.  
  
After she places the glass down in front of him — after he obediently starts sucking it up — she asks, “So, what happened tonight?”

 

 

  
He knows that there is potential with Yaya — that maybe they can be friends again — because he tells her about what happened with Missandei, and she ends up making him feel better about it.

He’s bouncing a rubber ball against the empty wall of her garage and making her dog go and fetch it. She told him she got this dog after the end of her marriage because her ex was allergic — so fuck him — and also it was hard to sleep in bed alone for a long while.

He gives Yaya the really short version of the story, which is that he wasn’t reading things incorrectly. He didn’t make it up in his head. Missandei was interested in more than just friendship with him, but Missandei also does not think that she can feel sexual attraction to him. He had to work pretty hard to get her to admit that to him — to get her to admit the truth to him. But once he heard it, it made sense. And so he had to tell her that he’s actually not down with a relationship that is devoid of sex. Like, that just won’t work for him. And that was that. They will just remain friends. They said goodnight after that.

Yaya says, “Good for you. That must’ve been a really hard conclusion to come to because I know how much you like her.”

“It wasn’t that hard,” he mutters, as he throws the ball again, as Muffin goes nuts and starts scrambling after it with her feet slipping against the smooth concrete. “I don’t waste my time anymore.”

“Ah, no one gets to fuck with you anymore,” she says, nodding along. And he thinks that she’s about to launch into their tried and true banter — or maybe she will try and revisit the past again, and he will have to stop her from bringing up old wounds.

Sure enough, she says, “You know, when we were little, you were fearless. I remember that you couldn’t sit still — you were always getting into shit and your dad was always yelling at you for it. I remember you as goofy and silly and affectionate and really, _really cute_ when you were young.”

She generally tells him a bunch of things he already knows. She tells him that after the accident, it was really hard for a while — for years. She remembers that he came back to school cold and withdrawn and defensive. He was really walled off. He stopped smiling. He stopped playing with other kids. He just withdrew into himself. She remembers herself and a lot of his classmates and friends asking about it — or expressing that they didn’t get it because they were young and they were kids. She didn’t understand why he didn’t just bounce back because Tal broke his arm by falling off the jungle gym and didn’t come back to school sullenly wearing a cast. She remembers a lot of conversations with adults, from their teachers, the school counselor — his mom even — who came to class one time while he was out with his specialist, to talk to them about how Grey was still in pain — both physical and emotional. Alayaya remembers how the adults in their lives talked to them about how they, as his friends, had to treat him nicely and keep asking him to play and hang out, even though he kept saying no —

“Okay, Yaya, seriously,” Grey interjects. “What is the fucking point in talking this much about pain?”

“Because you _overcame it,”_ she says, speaking a little bit louder. “You went to therapy. You started taking care of yourself. You started doing so much _work._ You started risking hard again. You started believing in things again. You just started doing these impossible things. You opened up again. You came back to us. You — you made me _love you.”_

“Oh my God,” he mutters, dropping the rubber ball, swatting at Muffin’s intrusive face at the same time he reaches out for her. He pulls her into a tight hug as she generally just continues sobbing. Part of the reason he doesn’t enjoy talking about this is because of _this._ She can be a bit of a basketcase. He gently strokes the back of her head and her hair as he says, “There there.”

It makes her laugh into his shoulder. She says, “I’m really sorry for what I did.”

He sighs. He says, “It’s fine. I learned a lot from it.”

She says, “I’m sorry that you always end up having to comfort and make other people feel okay about your injury. Me. Drogo. Her. It’s actually so fucked up.”

“Seriously,” he says. “When do I get to be comforted and told that it’s going to all be okay?”

“You aren’t the kind of person that needs to be told that it’s going to all be okay,” she corrects — a little bit needlessly because he is joking, but she wants to make a point.

“I’m really not,” he affirms.

“You _make it_ okay for yourself.”

“I try.”

She sniffles. “Can I also say — as someone who has had a lot of sex with you — I think it is _crazy_ that she doesn’t want to have sex with you.”

“I know, right?” he says sardonically. “Thanks for saying that, man.”

 

 

So he refrains from reaming himself, for breaking his own rule about not dating beautiful women for a while. Mistakes happen. Things happen. He tried and there is some honor in trying. At the very least, he knows that he hasn’t completely closed himself off because he’s just so sick and tired of going through this shit, over and over again. At the very least, he knows that he is still capable of emotional risk. At the very least, he isn’t in love with her, so it could be far, far worse.

He gives himself some space from Missandei. Because he will benefit from it, and she can probably use it, too. It will make it easier to transition to friendship, because he is open to that. It doesn’t cost him too much to be friends with people.

It’s actually this logic that pushes him to reach out to Drogo. He sends Drogo a text and says: _Hey, what’s up?_

Drogo writes back immediately, hitting him with: _Is everything okay?_

And, based on that response, Grey assumes that Drogo must know about what happened with Missandei because Missandei probably told Dany and Dany probably told Drogo.

He invites Drogo over to help him replace some rotted wood on his parents’ deck. He really _does_ need the second set of hands because his dad is old now and he doesn’t want his dad doing this shit anymore. Grey also figures that doing an activity together will stop him and Drogo from having to stare at each other awkwardly before they attempt to have a real conversation with each other.

Drogo is really eager. Drogo shows up early — and Drogo shows up early for _nothing._ Drogo also shows up with a bunch of tools that he temporarily pilfered from his mom’s house. Drogo grins when Drogo sees Grey walk out of the house with his dad.

Grey’s dad really ruins his cool by saying, “I’m really glad you two crazy kids are trying to make it work again. He was really depressed while you two were broken up. I was worried we’d have to switch his antidepressant again.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Grey says.

Drogo does not even care about Grey’s dad trying to embarrass Grey. Drogo just says, “Man, I’ve really _missed you._ Thanks so much for calling.”

“Yeah, man,” Grey says, blinking against the bright sun. “Sorry for taking so long to call.”

 

 

  
They don’t really get much of an opportunity to have a deep conversation because Grey’s dad hangs out on the deck with them as they work, and he generally backseat-drives the entire thing, making Grey slowly but surely lose his fucking mind. Drogo is just amused by Grey’s dad because Drogo’s mood is so great. Drogo laughs at all of Grey’s dad taunting and criticism, which only encourages Grey’s dad to keep going.

It’s a hot day, so the heat shortens Grey’s fuse substantially. He starts sweating from the effort of ripping up old planks. He swears angrily every time he unearths something new and terrible that he didn’t anticipate. Support beams also have to be replaced. About eighty percent of the fucking deck has to be rebuilt. They are not going to finish this in a day at all.

He has gained weight — in a good way. He has gained mass. Drogo noticed this right away when he first saw Grey in the driveway, but this gets confirmed when Grey takes off his shirt and uses it to angrily wipe his face. Drogo opts not to comment on it — because he’s just being so careful right now. He really doesn’t want to ruin this.

They have a bluetooth speaker out and are playing music from Grey’s phone as his dad gripes and bitches about Grey’s taste in music — and just in general about how music is just trash these days. Grey’s dad is asking what is it about the songs that go nigga this and nigga that, that Grey relates to, because he’s a middle-class twerp from the suburbs. Grey’s dad says, “Has anyone even ever called you that in your life? Because I know what it’s like to be called that. And let me tell you, I ain’t writing fucking songs about it. I also ain’t going around saying, ‘Hey, nigga!’ to your uncle. Son, are you letting _white people_ call you this?”

“Dad,” Grey says, breathing heavily — glowering. “You literally make me want to _kill myself_ sometimes.”

“Relax, son. I’m just joking with you. I really don’t care if you like listening to this shit and letting everyone call you nigga. You are so dramatic sometimes.”

“Dad! Literally _no one_ gets to call me the n-word!”

“The n-word? Seriously, son? You’re Black. Also, you are using the word literally wrong.”

“I’m actually using it right! I said you literally make me want to kill myself. It is true. _I want to kill myself_ when I have to listen to you speak. And I said I _literally_ don’t let anyone call me the n-word! And that _is right!_ I _don’t._ And I say n-word because mom hates that word, and she is standing right _there.”_

Seriously. His mom is standing in the doorway with a tray of iced teas and more cookies. She has no idea what they are talking about. She just heard an n-word variant coming out of Grey's dad a lot. She still addresses her son and says, “Thanks, baby.”

 

 

  
They need a truck for the support beams because Grey’s Prius just isn’t going to cut it. This is why they end up making a quick stopover at Drogo’s mom place. She lives close enough to Grey’s parents that they can actually walk over to her house.

Drogo’s mom loves Grey, so she basically runs out of the house to smother his face in kisses and pinches. His mom is ridiculous. She’s in her fifties but her hemline is still a little bit too high and her neckline is still a little too low. She keeps squeezing Grey and pressing her tits into him with all of the hugging.

And, much like Grey’s dad, she completely outs Drogo and tells Grey that she’s so glad they are friends again, because Drogo was just devastated when they were fighting.

Drogo says, “Ma, will you stop trying to make out with him? He’s basically half your age. Jesus Christ.”

“Boy, don’t disrespect me!” she says, menacingly pointing a shiny, long pink nail at him.

It takes fucking _forever_ explaining to her that they didn’t stop over to hang out with her and her friends. Like, Drogo didn’t bring Grey over to parade him in front of a bunch of clucking hens. They actually stopped over to borrow the truck because they need to go to the lumber yard and buy _fucking lumber._

His mom waves him off and tells him that it won’t take very long for them just to say hello to her friends. She tells him it’s very rude for them to come over and not greet elders.

So this is how they lose fucking twenty minutes in his childhood home. When they enter the house, about six women loudly exclaim in surprised unison and then yell, “Oh my! Is that Drogo?” before they start launching into a million questions about where his wife is, whether or not she’s pregnant yet, who his friend is before realizing that his friend is Grey. Then they start fawning over Grey and telling him that they haven’t seen him in _years._ They are asking him if he has a girl yet, if he is married yet, if he has children yet. Then one of them suddenly remembers his injury — Drogo’s Aunt Fefi — and she asks him if he _can_ have children.

It’s with the benefit of hindsight that Drogo realizes this is probably where he gets it from. This could be why it is easy for him to get oppressively hung up on the wrong things.

Grey is completely bewildered and disoriented by all of the loud, female attention. This is why he answers pretty honestly instead of cracking an easy joke about it. He just says, “Yeah. My testicles still produce sperm.”

Drogo’s mom swats at him. She says, “Grey! Language!”

He winces. He didn’t even realize he was saying a bad word. He has a certain vocabulary because he’s been dealing with medical professionals for basically his entire life. He’s too used to his mom and dad. He sometimes forgets that other people get a little prudish about normal body stuff. So he says, “Sorry, Auntie.”

 

 

  
“Holy shit,” Drogo mutters, shoving his keys into the ignition of the truck. “That was a lot.”

“How’s Dany with your mom?” Grey asks, like it is only just now occurring to him to ask.

“Oh, they totally hate each other but are forced to get along,” Drogo says, grinning widely. “It’s really hilarious.”

 

 

  
Now that support beams are in play, they talk about how it’d be nice to have a third or fourth person to make the work a little easier and faster. This is why Grey starts dialing numbers on his phone as Drogo drives them back to Grey’s parents’ house. Grey gets rejected about three times, various friends saying that they are busy with plans already — before Xhondo casually says that he’s not doing nothing important; he can come over.

He hasn’t arrived by the time they get back to the house and start unloading the beams off the truck bed. Grey sighs and says, “Fuck,” as he picks up an end and starts sliding it. He is still coming to terms with basically rebuilding the entire deck.

When Grey’s dad sees Xhondo pulling up to the house, before he heaves himself out of his car, Grey’s dad says, “Oh, shit, Sanaa. We need to go buy more food.”

 

 

  
If Alayaya made him feel a bit better with her really terrible pep-talk about how he’s so good at overcoming pain, then Drogo, his dad, his mom, and Xhondo make him feel a lot better by helping him keep his mind off of her.

He handles his dad’s constant flow of criticism a lot better in the afternoon, because he realizes that his dad is just worried about him and this is how his dad expresses concern. His dad probably should be in therapy for his own shit — for his own depression and PTSD — but his dad isn’t that type of person. His dad is also a hypocrite, because his dad was the one that really forced Grey to sit in a colorful room with a mental health professional even after he screamed at them and told them he didn’t want to. His mom was willing to let him step away from it for a while. His dad did not let him.

He appreciates his mom because she basically gives him the kind of love that he probably craves the most — the easy and almost unconditional kind. He likes that she doesn’t pressure him to talk. He likes that she still kicks his ass out of bed when he stays in there too long. He likes that she has been baking so many fucking cookies even though she’s not really into baking because she still feels guilty over the toilet thing.

He likes that Xhondo shows up and basically just starts punking his dad by drinking heavily as he lifts up beams like they are made of paper. Grey thinks it’s hilarious that Xhondo drunkenly tries to draw his dad into a conversation about whether he’s an ass man or a tits man. Xhondo looks at Grey’s mom and says, “Probably an ass man, right? No disrespect meant, Mrs. Torgo. I think you are a beautiful, mature woman. And you still can get it!”

“Honey,” Grey’s mom says patiently. “I don’t know how to feel about what you just said.”

His parents are lazy about cooking today — and they also lost hope when they saw Xhondo show up. This is why a fat stack of hot pizza boxes and several growlers of their home brew gets put down in between them, as the sun starts going down and the sky starts turning pink.

Drogo smiles as he starts pouring the frothy beer into tall glasses, handing them out. He says, “Mr. Torgo, do you remember the first time you caught me and Grey coming into the house drunk?”

“My ass remembers,” Grey says, touching said ass.

“I remember calling your mom and waking her up in the middle of the night to tell her she had to come retrieve your underaged stupid ass, yes,” Grey’s dad says.

“And Grey was like, oh, yay. He thought there was no way he was going to get his ass beat in front of my mom.”

“He was wrong,” his dad says.

“He was _really_ wrong,” Drogo says, delicately touching his stomach as he starts laughing for real.

And Grey finds that he appreciates Drogo because when Drogo refers to the past — he makes it feel light and easy. He makes it easy to laugh about.

 

 

 

 


	22. Missy has a meltdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scared that she has lost the future love of her life forever, Missandei starts making rational decisions. Just kidding. She totally loses it. Aw.

 

 

 

He has completely stopped texting her. And she has not texted him either. So more accurately, she should say that they have both decided to stop talking to each other.

She also finds that the world is none the wiser — probably because she doesn’t tell anyone about what happened. She hasn’t even told Olenna about it, and they had a session earlier in the week. Rather than talk about what happened with Grey, Missandei spent the forty-five minutes abstractly talking about guilt and responsibility. She talked about the purpose of guilt, the heavy weight of it, how to move through it, how to accept that there are things she cannot do and qualities she just doesn’t have.

Then she went home and spent the rest of the night Googling stuff about asexuality. Nothing she reads leads to a eureka moment, but she is kind of desperate to ascribe a reason to how fucking stupid she is being. Either she is asexual who never desires sex from anyone — indiscriminately — or she is a bigot who specifically does not want sex from him because his poor body has been through some serious trauma, and she is a _shitty human being_ because his trauma _disgusts_ her.

Her brother is the first person to say his name to her. Moss brings it up during family dinner as he bounces Rani in his lap, trying to get her to eat from the bowl of plain rice with salt in front of them. Moss tells Missy that she probably already knows this, but the PD has contracted with Grey’s company to do cybersecurity training sessions for the entire region’s IT team and cyber task force. Moss tells her that he didn’t sit in on the training — not his area of expertise of course — but he dropped in for the last five minutes of one and then grabbed Grey to go get a bite together. Moss tells her, “It was so trippy seeing professional Grey doing his thing. Because you know, when we met, he was drunk, high, and also passed out in the back of my squad car.” He shakes his head, chuckling ruefully.

“Who is Grey?” their dad asks, his ears having perked up after hearing the words drunk, high, and also the phrase ‘back of squad car.’

Mars smiles evilly. He says, “He’s Missy’s boyfriend. She _loooves_ him.”

She presses her lips in a tight line. Because now it just hurts. She refrains from commenting on it because she doesn’t even know what to say — and she knows anything she says will just fuel them. When they were all younger, her brothers only stopped making fun of her after she started crying in frustration. And whenever that happened, they got yelled at by their dad and then got pissed that their little sister was so sensitive and such a little narc. This is why she just has to keep her mouth completely shut.

“Oh!” their dad says, his brows arching up. After many years of his kids keeping secrets from him because of his anger issues, he is now more measured in his responses. He says, “You’re seeing someone, hon? And he’s . . . a drug-using drunk who is also an expert on cybersecurity? That’s . . . great!”

Mars is chuckling. He says, “Pop. Really good effort.”

“No, really,” their dad says, addressing Missandei, who is throwing some really angry looks at Mars. Their dad is misinterpreting his daughter's rage. He thinks that she is angry that her brother let the cat out of the bag. He thinks that she is afraid that he wouldn’t approve. This is why he forces a lot of artificial cheer into his voice as he says, “This is good news! You haven’t brought a fella around in a long while. Um, when do we get to meet him?” Their dad glances at their mom. “I mean, I see your brothers have met him and are on good terms with him.”

“Daddy, I’m done!” Rani announces.

“What?” Moss says, looking down at her bowl. “No, you’re not. There are so many rices left!”

“Don’t force her to eat,” their mom urges.

“She’s not going to get _fat,”_ Moss says in annoyance, because he’s sick of having this argument with his mom. “She actually just needs to grow. The doctor said —”

“Daddyyy!”

“Eat the _fucking_ rice!”

 _“Mossador!”_ Safi snaps.

“She’s _going_ to hear that word, especially in this household,” Moss says lowering his voice, staring back at his wife.

“It’s not the _word,”_ she says heatedly. “It’s the _tone._ Don’t talk our kid like that.”

“How am I supposed to get her to eat her rice!” Moss asks the rest of the table. And then to his daughter, he says, “Baby, will you please eat the rice? Daddy is asking you nicely.”

“I don’t want to!” she whines. “I’m full!”

“Okay, the fuck you are,” Moss says, scooping up a little pile of rice onto her spoon.

 _“DAD!”_ Chako yells — at the very top of his lungs. “I ate all of my rice! See!” Chako proudly flashes them all his empty bowl. He sees that his dad is still fighting with his sister, trying to shove a spoon into her mouth, so Chako shouts, _“Dad! Are you looking at my bowl!”_

“Oh my God,” Moss mutters. “I’m going to kill you both.”

 

 

  
The kids actually end up giving her a reprieve from her brothers because the kids steal all of the attention. Chako ends up smart-talking back at Moss and tests limits by calling his dad stupid. That pretty much just sets both Moss and Safi _off_ and they demand that Chako apologize to his father. That is the point when a switch randomly flips in Chako. He suddenly becomes aware that everyone is looking at him expectantly — it embarrasses him — so he starts bawling. And then Moss is like, what the fuck, why is this kid crying when _he_ was the one who was just insulted to his face? Nonetheless, he walks over and calmly picks up Chako and carries his son into the other room. And then he leaves him there to finish crying it out.

All the kids are just too rowdy in general. Kaden is wired and trying to bounce off the walls — also driving Mars nuts. So Mars and Moss quickly start making their exits after dinner is done.

At the door, Missandei gets on her tiptoes to give Rani’s tear-streaked face a quick cuddle and kiss as Moss bends down a little bit to give his daughter’s face to Missandei. Then he hikes her back up as she burrows her head back into his shoulder. He sighs. And then he says, “Hey, I wanna get some recipes from you,” as he rubs his daughter’s back. “Do you mind jotting down a few that you think she’d like?”

 _“Oh,”_ Missy says softly. “Is she having a hard time with gluten?”

“Yeah, she is. Her stomach hurts, and she gets these rashes. Also, she’s clearly not growing. Her doctor suggested putting her on a gluten-free diet.”

“Oh, wow,” Missandei says, frowning. “Poor baby.”

He sighs. He says, “Yeah, she’s a champ,” before he leans down and pushes a kiss into Missandei’s cheek. “Love you. Email me shit later, okay?”

 

 

  
She’s elbow-deep in some hot soapy water and pulling out a cleaver from the sink when her dad scares the shit out of her by sneezing like he is getting murdered. It’s a loud scream-sneeze. Missandei jumps and then when she gets her bearings again, she’s flashing the soapy metal cleaver in his direction as she says, “Dad! Do you seriously have to sneeze like that?”

He doesn’t answer that. Instead, he leans against the counter with a mug of stinky, hot medicinal tea in his hand. He is grinning at her. Kind of psychotically. Because happiness looks weird on her dad’s face. “So,” he says — just being so bad at faking casual. “Tell us all about him.”

This is when she hears the rapid, socked footsteps of her mom just hightailing it over across the tile floors from the office, where she was sorting mail. Her mom is saying, “Wait! I’m coming! What does he look like? Is he white? I mean, it’s okay if he is. I am just curious. He’s not white, is he? It is completely acceptable if he is. We are not prejudiced. Safi is Dothraki, and we love her anyway!”

“He’s gray,” her dad remarks, already cracking up over his own joke. “He’s gray because his name is Grey.”

She cannot lie to her parents in regard to this because they will figure out pretty fast that her fake boyfriend is fake and not real because he will never show up to family gatherings ever. This is why she shuts off the faucet, wipes a sponge around the sink, dries her hands on the towel hanging off the oven, and tells them that she actually is not dating anyone. She tells them that Moss and Mars are just making fun of her because they have a mutual friend in common.

Her mom states, “So he’s still a real person,” just slightly before her dad says, “Why would they make fun of you like this?”

“Because they always make fun of me, Dad.”

“No, I know that,” he says. “I mean — why are they joking about you dating this young man?” And then her dad starts guessing. “Is it because he’s not really that young? Is he old? Is he a _creep?_ Is he _ugly?_ Does he have a lisp? Is he a _predator?”_

“Yes, Dad, he’s a predator.”

“Bee!” her mom says. “Why are you hanging around a predator!”

“She is joking,” her dad says, admonishing her mom for being so gullible. “Missy has jokes now.”

 

 

  
She can’t really deter or distract her parents with any of her vague answers. Her dad like — gets _intense._ He goes into cop mode and starts paying really deep attention to what she is saying and how she is saying it. He starts just picking apart every nugget she drops. He asks her why she’s being cagey about this. She tells him that she’s not being cagey about it. He points out that she’s not keeping eye contact for very long — she is clearly uncomfortable. He asks her what in the fuck is going on — because now he is getting a bit concerned and when he gets concerned, he will just assume the worst. So she might as well come out and just tell them what is going on with her.

She is going into her turtle mode now. She is just keeping her mouth shut and staring at them, off and on. It is actually a pretty odd way to respond to these sorts of inquiries — and even she is aware of it. But she honestly doesn’t know what else to do. Whatever she says — her dad is going to read into it.

Her parents are utterly bewildered over how she is behaving. Her dad starts digging _deeper,_ to try and move the needle in her. He tells her that he knows that she didn’t invite them to her school thing — her work-school thing. He learned from Mars, and before she goes off and gets pissed at Mars again — it was an accident. Mars actually just assumed that she told them and mentioned it in passing. Her dad wonders out loud why she is keeping secrets from them. He tells her that they all used to be close — he remembers family vacations and dinners and sporting events and all of it — _what happened?_ He wonders why she withdrew.

This is when she says, “You’re kidding, right? This is a joke, _right?”_

He says, “I am not joking.”

Then she kind of explodes. Because she just cannot believe this shit right now. She cannot believe that she is standing here listening to him put the blame on her for the state of things. She is _not_ secretive. They are just jerks. They fucked her in the head and because of that, she can’t even make it work with a person who is utterly wonderful and perfect. She has lost him because of them. And then to listen to _this craziness_ — she snaps at her dad, and she tells him, “I’m in _therapy_ because of _you!”_

She is sure that she’s going to die after this. Because her dad is going to take his gun and murder her. So she just starts making her last moments count. She fights with herself and tries to stop herself from crying in front of them, as she tells them that they were never close and that he is making this shit up because he doesn’t want to deal with the truth. She struggles to tell them why — she stutters out that her dad was too angry and too drunk and her mom was too complacent and just allowed terrible things to happen. Missandei tells them that they made her scared to speak up so she just didn’t talk and she just didn’t form opinions — so now she is this handicapped adult who can’t even have a normal conversation with people. She tells them they have messed her up. She tells them that they should’ve just divorced because she doesn’t understand why they continue staying together, if they just make each other so fucking miserable.

“We stay together because I love your mom,” her dad cuts in.

And when Missandei glances at his face — she learns that her words have had this unexpected impact.

Rather than reflect anger, her dad’s face is actually showing a lot of pain. He is grimacing, his skin has darkened, and he shakes his head at her — maybe because he’s ashamed of her or he doesn’t see her as his daughter anymore.

Then he says, “I need to go for a drive,” as he turns around, rubbing his forehead, hunting for his car keys.

The door to the garage shuts audibly — but softly. It doesn’t get slammed.

As the garage door whirs open, her mom, who has teared up, says, “I can’t believe you just said that to us. I never would’ve thought — I need you to leave right now.”

 

 

  
She expects both of her brothers to individually call her and chew her ass out for being mean to their parents, but the lectures never come. She occasionally looks down at her phone, turning it on to ensure that it is still working.

Finally, Moss does texts her — to remind her to send him recipes.

She has a permanent headache from all the crying she did after leaving her parents’ house. She even takes a sick day off from work and spends the entirety of it lying in bed, alternating between more crying and unsatisfying naps. She over-medicates herself with her antihistamine and her sleep medication so that she can just pass through time faster. Her naps feel drugged and fuzzy.

In the midst of all of the stupor, she manages to call Dany to tell Dany not to worry. She’s just mildly depressed.

This alarms Dany — like, a lot. Dany ditches work after half of a day and shows up to Missandei’s apartment with a bunch of gluten-free food. Dany knows that she’s backsliding, that she’s being intrusive because Missandei didn’t ask her to come over at all — but _fuck that shit._

Dany opens Missy’s front door with her copy of Missandei’s house keys, does a quick visual search for Missandei, and then wanders into the bedroom, where she finds Missandei in her messy, unwashed glory.

Dany says, “Oh my God.”

And from her prostrate position on her bed, Missandei says, “Oh my God, I could’ve killed you. I thought you were an intruder.”

Dany throws Missy a sharp look and walks over to her nightstand, picking up all of the prescription bottles to read the labels on them. In the course of doing this, Missandei slurs, “I didn’t OD. It’s hard to OD on Lunesta and Benadryl.”

 

 

  
The next time Missy wakes up is two hours later. And those two hours were plenty of time for Daenerys to really hone her rage. When Missandei starts showing signs of life again, for instance, Dany gets out of the chair that she dragged in from the kitchen and immediately slaps Missandei in the bare thigh and makes her yelp in surprise as she grabs her thigh. Missy groans and says, “Ow, my leg,” as she rolls over onto her side.

“Oh my God, what the fuck is wrong with you?” This is something Dany has been urgently wanting to ask Missandei for the past two hours.

“Everything,” Missandei mutters, throwing her arm over her face.

“Shut up,” Dany says, reaching out to grab Missandei’s arm by the wrist, before she _chucks_ the appendage off Missy’s face. “You are scaring the _shit_ out of me.”

“Sorry,” Missandei mutters, staring at the ceiling now, blinking back tears now.

 

 

  
Dany thinks that throwing some water on Missandei will help with the body odor and also the drug-drunkenness. Even though Missandei is bigger than she is, Dany still manages to drag Missandei out of the bed by hooking her arms underneath Missy’s pits and using rage-fueled brute strength to yank Missandei off. They clumsily fall to the floor with a thump — Missandei groans and touches her head — and Dany figures that Missy probably didn’t suffer that much of a head injury, so she starts dragging Missandei’s body across hardwood floors, into the bathroom.

Missandei starts fighting Dany when she starts trying to take off the rest of Missandei’s clothes. Missandei is weakly beating Dany with clenched fists as Dany wrestles her shirt off, with her eyes almost shut because she doesn’t want to be blinded by Missandei’s flailing limbs. Missandei is repeating, “What are you _doing?”_ over and over.

And Dany is responding with, “You need a bath!”

“What?” Missy says, with her face planted into the floor and her ass up in the air as Dany quickly unhooks her bra. Missandei is covering her breasts as she says, “My hair, though.”

Dany loudly grunts as she picks up and then pushes Missandei’s naked body into her tub.

Missandei, who is more compliant now, says, “Goddamn, you are surprisingly strong.”

 

 

  
The water is super hot — which is okay because it keeps her alert. Missy splashes around a little bit. She thinks that this is way weird — but also kind of okay? But it is still way weird that Dany is watching her bathe.

Dany takes a seat on the toilet and lets the tub fill up completely to the top. It steams up the entire bathroom and the scent of coconut and lavender fills the room as Dany picks up Missandei’s co-wash and flicks the lid open.

Missy looks down at her boobs — there are like, not even bubbles in this bath — as Dany wets her hands and then starts gently scrunching watered down co-wash into Missandei’s curls.

Dany says, “So, what happened?”

Missy says, “I don’t have parents anymore.”

Dany freezes, with her hands still in Missy’s hair. She said, “What?”

And then Missy realizes what it sounds like. Her voice is tired and weary as she corrects herself. She says, “Oh, they’re fine. They didn’t like, die. They’re just disowning me and stuff.”

 

 

  
They spend the rest of the night surrounded by takeout boxes full of gluten-free, dairy-free munchies, glasses of water, and ensconced in pajamas. Missandei goes through the incredibly labor-intensive process of detailing every fucking horrible thing that has happened ever since Grey rejected her and told her that he would never love her.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what he said,” Dany says, voice all blase and even, as she stabs her fork into some curried tofu.

“You talked to him about me?” Missy asks, her voice lilting up into hopefulness. And then she immediately lowers her voice and upon deeper thought, she says, “Oh shit, did you talk to him about me?”

“No,” Dany says. “I just know he didn’t say that because that’s completely not in his nature — to say something like that.”

Missandei groans and throws her damp head against the back of her couch. She says, “I should’ve just made myself try and have sex with him!”

“Yeah? That sounds healthy,” Dany says, arching a brow. “What would you have said? What would’ve been your sex moves?”

“I dunno,” Missy mutters. “I’d probably take off all my clothes. Tell him to bask in the sight of this.” She gestures up and down her flannel-clad body. “And then I probably would’ve done a few warm-up lunges.”

 

 

  
Dany calls Drogo to tell him that she’s not coming home because she’s going to spend the night with a crazy bitch. Drogo tells her to say hi to Missandei for him, which makes Dany laugh all throaty and sadistically into the phone. She tells him she loves him and that she will see him when she sees him.

After she hangs up, she catches Missandei watching her on the other end of the couch. She stares back at Missandei and throws her best friend a look of inquiry.

Missandei says, “My dad told me that he loves my mom — in response to the terrible things I said to them. I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot.”

“What have you been thinking?”

“That love is just weird!” Missandei decrees, throwing her hand out with flourish. “My parents love each other? Really? _Really?_ I feel like my entire life has been a lie!”

 

 

 

 


	23. Grey goes off his meds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While the future love of his life is throwing little mini bombs all over her life and blowing it up, Grey gracefully goes off his antidepressant without much fanfare. Swoon!

 

 

 

During his next visit with Dr. Tarly, Dr. Tarly actually suggests to Grey that he try getting off his antidepressant. Grey, who has been on antidepressants since he was 12 years old, suddenly gets all scared and worried that Dr. Tarly doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about because Dr. Tarly is so young and hasn’t been a doctor for very long. Dr. Tarly’s inexperience might _kill_  Grey.

Grey actually says, “What if I get massively depressed off my medications and try to off myself?”

Dr. Tarly is not even fazed. He says, “I don’t think that will happen.”

The way Dr. Tarly phrased that is not comforting enough. It sounds like the guy is just throwing things at walls and hoping something will stick. Then, Dr. Tarly tells Grey that he’s sure that Grey’s depression is in remission. He tells Grey that Grey has had a number of challenges in the past year — his dad’s health, a cross-continental move, new job, various personal upheavals — and Grey has handled it all with aplomb.

Grey stutters and says he was able to handle it well because of his medication. Dr. Tarly gently refutes this and says it’s not the medication. It’s Grey himself.

Dr. Tarly then lays out a treatment plan for Grey to taper off the Zoloft, if he wants to. Grey will be checking in with Dr. Tarly once every few weeks on the phone to see if there are any relapses and to monitor withdrawal symptoms. Dr. Tarly also suggests that Grey go back to psychotherapy for the few months it will take him to fully taper off. Dr. Tarly says they will go really slow with this.

Grey feels utterly infantile, when he blurts out, “I have to talk to my dad, before making a decision on this.”

 

 

  
His dad is initially like, “The fuck! Is he crazy?” when Grey tells him what Dr. Tarly said. His dad is thinking like a father and not a doctor. This is because his dad acutely remembers his small child constantly crying in pain and wishing to just die already. He remembers feeling utterly terrified and helpless in response.

Then Grey’s mom steps in and makes Grey slow down a bit and explain more. She asks him to detail out the reasons why Dr. Tarly thinks he doesn’t need to be on his antidepressants anymore.

Grey has to awkwardly compliment himself — and it feels really strange to because he is bad at bragging. He tells his folks that Dr. Tarly says he is in really good physical and mental health. He brought up his weight, which was suggested to him by Dr. Tarly. He works out regularly. He eats well. He can sleep without medication. He has not needed to his anti-anxiety meds since coming back to King’s Landing. Then there’s the hard stuff with family and also stuff with Drogo and Missandei — and he didn’t like, succumb into the throes of depression. He was kind of moody and pretty bummed, but being pretty bummed when he loses people he cares about is pretty par for the course. He has been through a lot of personal life changes and stresses in the past year — like, his job is pretty stressful — but he has just been like, nailing shit left and right, making good decisions and stuff.

Dr. Tarly also pointed out that he started his meds right after the accident, which makes sense because he was obviously severely depressed after the accident. Dr. Tarly said he probably _did_ need the antidepressant for years after the accident — but it’s possible that if the accident had never happened, Grey would never have been depressed. Azzie is not depressed. Mom is also not depressed. The depression in their family might be more circumstantial than hereditary maybe?

“Okay,” his mom says. “You’re selling me on this. And what is there to be gained if you get off your meds? And I know just the idea of not being drugged is enough reason — but humor me and explain it.”

“Um, hard to say,” Grey says. “It’s hard to predict. But there was something Alayaya recently said to me that kind of stuck out to me. She said that when we were little, before the accident, I was goofy, silly, and affectionate. What if that’s the person I am off drugs? What if I’m more like Azzie off drugs?”

“I really don’t think so, son,” his dad interjects. “You are who you are. The drug is working for you and isn’t masking who you are. And no offense to your brother, but I actually really like the way you currently are.”

“Dr. Tarly also said that I’d also stop dealing with the side effects of my antidepressant if I get off it. Like the sexual side effects.” Grey pauses, pursing his lips temporarily. “Like, I haven’t wanted to date anyone in a long while. Maybe it’s time to try dating again?”

“Oh shit,” his dad says, cracking a smile now. “Okay, now you’re selling _me_ on this, Nudho. Yeah, okay, let’s get you off this shit so you can find a lucky lady to _impregnate_ and make us some cute _grandbabies.”_

 

 

  
He calls up his old therapist and asks the guy to make an exception for a few months. Even though he is no longer a melodramatic teenager with a death wish, he still hopes that his former therapist will be interested in listening to him talk about his boring life shit. Grey tells his former therapist that he just doesn’t feel like starting up talk therapy with someone new. It will take weeks, if not months, for him to feel comfortable with someone new. By that time, he will have finished tapering off his meds. He’d rather just be lazy and go with someone he already feels bonded with for the short amount of time that he needs a professional to monitor him.

The waiting room and office is still really colorful — because most of the clients who come through here are kids and teens.

His new-old therapist, who hasn’t seen him in over a decade, says, “Wow. Look at you!” when Grey appears in the doorway.

Grey grins and leans forward, shaking hands. He says, “Hey, Syrio. How’s it going?”

 

 

  
Missy has not been to family dinner in nearly an entire month. Her brothers definitely know that something is up at this point but — possibly because they have busy lives and their own families to deal with — they are not up in her face very much about it. Both of them have gone to the mat with their parents at points over the years. It’s not that weird.

But, during a break in his shift, over the phone with her, Mars does briefly express that their dad walks around like a broken shell of a man now, and their mom sucks in a really dramatic, shuddering breath every now and then. He laughingly says to her, “You really fucked them up, you motherfucking _savage.”_ His laugh is booming, deep, and masculine. He tells her that he thinks it’s weird that Missandei’s second rebellion is happening like, fifteen years after the first one. He tells her that it’s like she just fucking woke the hell up one day or something.

Before he hangs up, he says to her, “I haven’t seen you in a while. Let’s plan on getting together separately or something. Text me, you motherfucking l _ate-bloomer.”_

She actually never has one-on-one dinners with Mars ever. Moss is always there or they are having dinner as an entire family. So she actually blushes a little bit in response to his bossy demand. She says, “Okay, I’ll throw out some dates,” trying to sound super cool and super casual about it.

She’s kind of been killing it in therapy lately. She’s slogging through a lot of material really efficiently. Like, when she told Olenna that her dad called her secretive, can you _believe_ that? — Olenna was like, actually yeah. Olenna told Missandei that she is actually pretty secretive. Olenna points out that it took a while for Missandei to divulge that something happened with Grey in therapy. It took a really long time and a lot of pushing for Missandei to tell the guy how she feels about him. It took _decades_ for her to be honest with her parents.

When this was pointed out to her — and this is probably the millionth time that this has been pointed out to her — it finally clicks. She finally was like, holy shit, she is pretty bad at letting people know what is up! Whoa, breakthrough!

After backburnering talking points about her parents for a session — on account of having no updates because they have all been avoiding one another — Missandei tells Olenna that Mars like, asked her out to dinner. She’s kind of giddy about it. And she realizes that she’s talking about it in a really creepy way because he’s like, her brother and she is wondering what she should wear on this date with her brother — but this is momentous! He like, might respect her now! He might like, see her as an equal! Maybe! They might become friends now! He might start making fun of her less! They might develop inside jokes with each other!

While Olenna is amused by all of this — by Missandei’s infectious good mood, optimism, and liberal use of humor in the face of hardship — Olenna still pivots and says, “Speaking of dating someone who is not your brother — have you seen Grey yet?”

The smile completely drops off Missandei’s face at that. She tenses up a little bit, frowns, and says, “No. I haven’t seen him since, um, our big talk. Um, he’s not an avid Instagram user, but I did get drunk and I did go on his account and liked a bunch of his posts from three years ago. I did it because I thought it’d be funny.”

“Wait,” Olenna says. “Are you serious?”

Missandei nods. “I am totally serious. You know what Instagram is? You’re so hip, Olenna.”

“My grandkids are on it,” Olenna says absently. “Missandei, I think you should reach out to Grey and talk to him.”

Missandei sighs, reaching up to tuck some of her hair behind her ears. She says, “I know. It’s on my list of really difficult shit to do, which includes making up with Tyrion, which also includes fucking apologizing to my parents while also expanding on why I told them that they made me into a handicapped adult.” Missandei shrugs. “I’m procrastinating,” she says.

 

 

  
Missandei doesn’t really actively make a decision to be utterly sloppy and reckless about making up with Tyrion, but she is emotionally fatigued and she has a list to get through. So she sends Tyrion a meeting notice for lunch. They haven’t had lunch together in about six months. Nonetheless, he accepts right away.

Her stomach is in knots when he questioningly stops by her office right before their eleven o’clock meeting. He asks her, “Where do you want to eat?”

 

 

  
Over a steak salad at a joint that is within walking distance from their office, Missandei actually tells him that she is sorry. Not for being the victim of sexual harassment — that was fucked up — but she is sorry for completely freezing him out for half of a year. She is sorry for not giving him more grace and more leniency. She tells him she was just really wrapped up in her own feelings about it and got really internal. She tells him that she is really just figuring it out — that she is just sometimes really bad at responding to and dealing with stress and conflict. Like, she realizes that they all know this and they all joke about this all the time, like, oh hey, Missy is so awkward and quiet and paralyzingly shy — ha ha! — but self-awareness is layered like a cake. She didn’t get to the deepest layer until recently. She tells him that she knows that she just dropped their friendship because she was just being such a little bitch about it — she was too scared to just fully engage with him and tell him how he had hurt her so badly.

“I know I hurt you,” he says quietly.

“I should’ve explicitly said it out loud,” she says. “You only knew that you had hurt me because I started acting differently around you. That was cowardly of me.”

“No, I knew I hurt you right away,” he gently corrects, turning his glass of water in place. “I saw your face.”

 

 

  
After just murdering lunch with Tyrion, Missandei — who _does_ realize that she is a tad manic right now, but it’s the good kind of manic so it is fine enough — sends Grey a text out of the blue to ask him if he wants to grab a bite or grab coffee in the next couple of days or so. It takes him a few hours to get back to her, and when he does, he tells her he can do coffee.

She completely stops herself from overthinking that, from going down an anxiety rabbit hole about how he probably fucking hates her guts now and that’s why he is refusing to have a meal with her. He probably just has a busy schedule and dinner plans for the next three days — probably. Who is he having dinner with though? Is he having dinner with another woman? Is he out there dating again? Has he fallen in love with someone and is _that_ why he only wants to get coffee with her?

Her whole body feels like it is trying to eat itself when she gets to the coffee shop. She nervously looks at the door every time it opens and some asshole who is not Grey walks through.

He is five minutes late — and when he finally arrives — it feels like it’s been _years_ since she has seen him. She immediately hops off her high chair to stand and greet him. A smile just transforms his entire face — uplifts it and _her_ — and it makes her think, for the millionth time, that holy _shit,_ maybe she should just close her eyes and just lie there and let him just do stuff to her body — if that means that she can keep him.

He knocks his hat up a little bit as he walks up to her, so he can see her better. He’s grinning widely as he says, “What’s up! I haven’t seen you in _forever!_ How’ve you been? I’m so glad you texted!”

She almost blurts out something crazy like: Oh my God, just marry me.

But instead, she says, “Hey! You’re a little late!”

He pauses over that — he actually pauses as he’s in the middle of trying to hug her hello. He straightens and drops his arms to his side. He looks taken aback. And then he says, “Yeah, sorry, man. I had to high-tail it over from the Eastside. I was helping my friend set up this new stereo system in his car —”

“Oh! You didn’t have to rush over here —”

“We were about done anyway. There was a little traffic —”

“Oh, it’s totally cool! Five minutes isn’t a big deal —”

“I mean you kinda brought it up.”

“Aw,” she says. “We still have great rapport!”

He chokes on his surprised laugh. His eyes fly open comically before he blinks. And then he recovers — it happens in the span of maybe a second. He chuckles at her. He shakes his head like he still can’t believe it sometimes. He pushes down invisible air with his palms, and he says, “Something’s different here. Why do I feel like we’re about to have a _conversation?”_

 

 

  
He apologetically tells her he only has an hour with her. After that, he has to run home, change his clothes, and then run off to meet a friend for pickleball.

She is wondering why he is referring, vaguely, to all of these friends that he has — are they new? She wonders how he was so easily able to replace her in his life, not realizing that the void she left forced him to find people to distract himself with. She observes to herself that she has made no new friends since they’ve been apart, because she’s still not as cool as he is. She’s never going to be as cool as he is. She _really_ should just let him try and have sex with her body, what the fuck?

An hour is not enough time to cover everything. An hour is not enough time for her to psychotically shove out all of the self-discoveries she has made in therapy, for her to tell him all about how she broke her parents’ hearts and now they are probably both going to die early now, from busted hearts. An hour isn’t enough for her to confess that she just really, really desperately _misses_ him. She misses him even more when she is in his presence, because the reality of him is just so _immense._ She misses him so much that it _aches_ and it makes her randomly tear up sometimes.

It is just so fucking crazy. She cannot say this shit to him in the middle of a busy coffee shop right before he has to run off and go play pickleball. She doesn't even know what pickleball is.  
  
An hour is actually enough for him to tell her that he's in the middle of getting off his antidepressant — he’s about to be completely drug-free.

She is surprised. She asks, “How does it feel?”

He says, “Sometimes a little whoozy and sometimes a little foggy — but honestly? Fucking amazing.”

“How is it amazing?” she asks. “Is it a lot different?”

“It’s not a lot different,” he says, looking down at the leaf in his mocha that he partially ruins by taking a sip. He takes inspiration from it. He says, “It’s like the difference between high-def and 4K ultra high-def. Like, the picture and the story are still the same at their core — but the colors in 4K are just a touch more vibrant, the details a touch more pronounced. You’re like, holy shit — I’ve been watching TV a little bit off for the majority of my life.”

“I thought you said that 4K is sometimes overkill?” she says.

In response to that, he laughs in delighted surprise — because he _does_ remember saying that to her. He remembers when he said it. He remembers where he said it. He says, “Okay, so that still stands. It _is_ sometimes overkill. Fuck me, I used the same analogy in two different situations and now it’s confusing.”

She is staring at him — she knows. And he notices. As explanation for her staring, she says, “You’ve gained some weight.” What she really wants to say is that he looks _so happy_ now. He looks like he’s been doing really well without her — which makes her sad but also pretty glad.

“Yeah, am I like, fat now?” And then he doesn’t let her answer. He just kind of _giggles_ a little bit and says, “My doctor told me I was a tad underweight. So I brought it up a little bit.”

“You carry it well,” she says simply.

“Thanks.”

 

 

 

 


	24. Grey is DTF

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey finds there are some pleasant and unpleasant effects in going off his medication, makes a really brilliant speech about how he kind of thinks that the future love of his life is kind of an asshole. The future love of his life is crying in the middle of McDonald's because she's also figuring out that she might kind of be an asshole! Then, everyone goes to a party.

 

 

 

  
When they show up, Tal presses a six-pack into Grey’s chest before he walks in, surveying Alayaya’s new place. He whistles lowly and says the pad is nice — very Yaya. Tal touches the top of a small ebony statue and bends down to look at it. He says, “This little dude has a big black dick and huge tits. What the fuck?” as Kojja bends down to vigorously pet Muffin’s body.

“It’s a fertility deity,” Grey says plainly, kind of like Tal is stupid — or kind of like Tal is so Westernized now that he constantly forgets things about their culture.

Balaq puts on some music and turns up the volume before making himself at home on the couch. He spreads out across white leather, shuts his eyes, bobs his heads, and starts mouthing along to lyrics.

Drogo, Yara, and Obara show up soon after that, holding bags of hot, greasy fried chicken that they picked up on the way over. Grey dutifully play’s host and grabs the oil-stained bags from them and scurries into the kitchen for some plates and cups.

Quick introductions are made. Grey has a stack of real plates in his arms as he quickly gestures in between two completely incorrect groups. He actually gestures between Xhondo and Drogo and says, “High school friends, meet new friends.”

Drogo glances at Xhondo and says, “We already know each other.”

Xhondo says, “We played football together.”

“We recently built a deck together.”

“We took honors trig together.”

Grey shakes his head as he unloads the stack of plates onto the coffee table. He says, “You guys are so fucking annoying.”

Casual small talk gets made as they start digging into the food. Yara takes her keychain and starts flipping caps off of beer bottles as she passes around drinks. Kojja asks Drogo where his wife is — because Drogo’s wife rarely shows up to these kinds of outings. Drogo answers bluntly and said he honestly just didn’t invite her because she is an uptight white lady who just makes other people feel uncomfortable sometimes. He thought it was just better for her to stay home so he can actually like, fucking _relax._

This makes Kojja laugh.

Tal asks Grey if he’s done a proper snoop yet — has he looked in all of the drawers and closets?

Grey says no. He respects other people’s privacy and also, nothing he potentially finds will be interesting to him whatsoever.

Tal asks, “Ain’t it a little weird, for you to be inviting people over to your ex’s place, while she is out getting fucked by an accountant?”

Grey appears to think about this. Then he says, “I mean, I’m just glad she told me she was going to be having sex with another man this time around.”

“Oh, _that’s what’s up!”_ Xhondo says loudly, bring his fist to his mouth in appreciation.

“She told me to invite you guys over,” Grey adds more seriously, shrugging, reaching down to grab Muffin’s collar with both hands. Muffin is suspiciously sniffing the air, pulling in the smell of chicken.

Everyone already knows that he is sleeping over at Alayaya’s place while she is on a date because Muffin is not used to the new place yet. Alayaya was scared that Muffin would spend the whole night crying and whimpering when she figures out that her mommy is not coming home, so that is why Alayaya asked Grey if he’d mind dogsitting for just one night.

 _“Mannn,”_ Tal draws out. “Whipped while you were with her, still whipped when you ain’t.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Kojja says, before biting into a crunchy chicken wing. “He is _terrible_ with women.”

“Drogo, you ashamed of us?” Balaq randomly pipes up. “Is this why you keep your wife away from us?”

“No, man!” Drogo says. “If anything, I’m ashamed of _her.”_

 

 

  
He tells Syrio that he has experienced a distinct uptick in his sex drive now that he is tapering off his meds. He can orgasm faster and more easily now. He sees random beautiful women that he doesn’t know, and he pictures complete strangers naked now. He tells Syrio he thinks about sex every now and then — or a lot — like, he thinks about how he misses it and how he fucking wants to have it again. Grey says, “So that’s fucking annoying.”

Syrio grins, because this guy still has quite the potty mouth. Syrio suggests to Grey that this is actually a good development — that wanting intimacy again is really healthy and human. Syrio tells Grey to turn his frown upside down, which makes Grey laugh and observe that Syrio still definitely talks to children all day.

Grey hugs a unicorn-shaped pink pillow to his chest, and he vaguely says, “The idea of dating again is scary.”

“Why? You’re a handsome guy. You have a good job. You’re funny. You are very intelligent. You’re very caring. You’re quite the catch. I think any number of women would be very interested in —”

“Okay,” Grey says, holding his hand up to stop this terribly embarrassing onslaught of compliments. “It’s not that easy.”

“What happened to you when you were young doesn’t define you, Grey.”

“I know it doesn’t,” Grey says, reluctantly. “But it’s . . . always in the back of my mind. Because it has to be. Whenever I meet someone new that I might be interested in, I’m always just _dreading_ when I have to tell her about what happened to me. I fixate on the timing of it, because if I tell her too soon, she will be completely turned off or disgusted — and potential dies on the spot. But if I wait too long to tell her — then she feels like I lied to her or misled her or manipulated her — and she gets upset with me and potential _dies_ on the spot. And I get so wrapped up in _her feelings_ about _my injury,_ that I don’t get to have my own. I don’t get to feel so fucking _angry_ that people feel so entitled to know things about my body right away. Women have the audacity to expect me to disclose this shit about myself right when we first meet — otherwise _I’m_ the _asshole._ What right does anyone have to know something deeply personal about me right off the bat? Just so she can decide whether or not she wants to _waste her time with me?_ It’s unfair. And that is why I fucking _hate_ dating.”

As much as he tries not to let himself mentally go here because it’s pointless to get so angry about it — anger changes nothing — he still sometimes slips up and falls into the trap. Right now, he’s actually thinking about Missandei. And he’s actually thinking about Yaya. He is thinking that with Yaya, he had the benefit of growing up with her, of knowing her for many, many years before anything happened between them. She grew attached to him enough that his deficiency became something she could get over and overlook.

He doesn’t have this with Missandei. It means fucking nothing to him, when women tell him that he is so great, _except_ for this one thing that is completely fundamental to who he is. It fucking doesn’t move him at all, when women tell him that they wish things could be different, as if their narrow- and close-minded disgust of his body is an innate and biological response that is out of their control. People just are bad at accepting the fact that they are superficial assholes.

Grey bitterly he tells Syrio that he doesn’t really want to fucking beg a woman to _tolerate_ him because his personality _makes up_ for his physical deformity. _Fuck_ that _shit._ He also asks Syrio, “Do you think I should just put this in my Tinder profile? ‘Hey, my name is Grey. I like food, music, and I have no dick.’”

Syrio is learning forward, reaching out for Grey’s forearm, which he briefly squeezes. He wearily says, “Grey, you are so special. I’m really sorry you’ve been hurt.”

 

 

  
She actually has to meet Mars and the kids at a McDonald’s, because Mars is on dad duty, and it’s the only time he has available to hang out. He tells her it’ll be fine. She can be a buffer between him and other parents because he hates making small talk with other parents. The kids will be distracted smashing their faces into a bunch of urine- and feces-covered molded plastic. Mars and Missy will have a lot of time to catch up and chat.

A older woman standing behind them in line at the food counter assumes that they are a family — which is actually accurate — so she leans forward, cuts into their conversation, and says, “You two have a really beautiful family.”

Mars is palming Kaden’s head as Kaden spins around in place, and he calmly looks at the woman and says, “Thanks. This is my sister, by the way. Not my wife.” And then when he turns around, he throws Missandei a face of utter disgust before he rolls his eyes.

Missy watches as her big brother manages his kids. They are really energetic kids so they like to tell stories and they like to randomly scream and jump around. When Mara randomly lifts up her shirt and flashes everyone in the establishment, Mars reaches out and yanks her shirt back down. He snaps at Mara and tells her to keep her shirt _down._ Mara argues with her dad and says that Kaden runs around with his shirt off all the time. Mars says, “He’s a boy. And he’s older.”

“So I can take off my shirt when I get older?” Mara asks, already sounding impressively snotty.

“No!” Mars snipes. “Jesus Christ, just eat your food, baby. Then you can go play. Fucking driving me _nuts.”_

After a few seconds tick by, Missandei kind of gently knocks on the table — to remind her brother that hello, she is still here. She is not eating because there is absolutely nothing she can eat here and she doesn’t trust that it’s not cross-contaminated. She sucks up some soda through her straw though. And then she says, “Hey, you might want to be a little more careful with Mara — with the body stuff. When she grows up, she might have all sorts of hang-ups about her body and S-E-X if her dad yells at her too much.”

“Did you just spell out sex?” Mars asks quizzically. Then he sighs. “Missy, I don’t really need you to school me on how to raise my kid.”

 

 

  
So . . . she is not really her brother’s equal at all. It doesn’t seem like they are going to become good friends. It also doesn’t seem like they are developing any inside jokes.

Rather, she just hangs out quietly as Mars raggedly fields the millions of questions that come out of his kids — from why polar bears are white to why water is wet to why stars twinkle. He alternates between tiredly Googling things on his phone, telling his kids that he just doesn’t know the answer to their questions, or just straight up lying to them.

Missy can hear him breathe a sigh of relief when the kids ask him permission to go play. He agrees and tells them they can go play after they clean up and put away the trays.

Missandei hasn’t been to one of these in a really long time. She has forgotten this smell — it’s pretty gross — and it’s a little chilly so she stands with her arms crossed as she watches Kaden quickly make a new friend and then start screaming through the playland.

Mars throws his huge, stiff denim jacket on her — which immediately envelopes her in warmth. Then he says, “Sis, I hang out with violent murderers, pedophiles, and rapists all day — and you know what? They look like normal people.” He gestures to the other adults in the playland. He says, “They look like these people. Except, you know, mostly men.” He sighs. He says, “It scares the shit out of me, when I’m not around to protect them.”

She nods, pulling the flaps of his jacket tighter around her body.

After that, they have a pretty smooth conversation. He asks her what the hell she said to their father that broke that man down so comprehensively. She tells him what she said to their parents — and in response to her explanation, Mars is like, “Wow.”

She nervously bites her lip and asks him if he thinks she was too hard on their folks. He says, “A little,” which makes her feel terrible. But he also says, “It’s okay. They’ll get over it.” He tells her that he actually hasn’t thought about that stuff in a long while — he kind of just forgot. Maybe he blocked it out. Or maybe he’s just so distracted by his own family and raising his own kids — he doesn’t do very much self-examination. He says that maybe he should.

He also tells her that he gets it. He gets how she feels. He also gets how their dad and mom feel — especially their dad. He tells her that the job is really fucking hard — just an emotional grind constantly. Mars tells her that it’s really hard to constantly see the worst of humanity. It’s also kind of stressful to go to work and accept that maybe today is the day that he is never going to see his family ever again. Maybe today is the day that he really fucks up his children by leaving them. He tells her that their father wasn’t in a good place for a long time, because it’s easy to get lost in the job. Plus, the PD was a completely different animal — when their dad was coming up through the ranks. It was probably way fucking racist when their dad was coming up. It’s a lot different now. It’s more hospitable now. There’s lots of training around diversity and inclusion now. There are lots of outreach efforts now. There’s also a lot more focus on mental health.

Mars also carefully says, “He’s been trying really hard though — for the past five or so years — don’t you think? Ever since he got sober?”

She’s crying as she nods. Because she really feels fucking terrible right now.

He says, “Hey, don’t cry,” which is a dumb thing to say to a crying person, because it only makes the crying intensify. “I didn’t say that stuff to make you cry. I just wanted to offer another perspective.”

She covers her mouth to muffle the crying as Mara spontaneously runs up and is like, “Daddy, why is Auntie crying?”

Mars swats at her. He says, “None of your business. Adult stuff. Get outta here.”

Mara glances at Missy before she obediently runs off and jumps back into the ball pit.

Then Mars shifts the conversation. He says, “Hey, yo, are you and Grey fucking? Like for real. Like, I’m truly asking. Me and Mossy want to know.”

He is _clearly_ trying to distract her.

And it works. Her jaw drops and her eyes expel a last set of tears as they go wide. She says, “Excuse me!”

“You know that he has no dick, right?”

“Well, _yeah.”_

“So you _are_ fucking him!” he declares, making a few other parents glance in their direction. “Just interrogated your fucking ass. Just caught you in your own web of lies.”

She sniffles and laughs, as she uses his sleeves to wipe her eyes and her runny nose. He tells her that she’s so gross and that he’s going to have to wash his coat now, as he reaches around and pulls her into a tight sideways hug.

 

 

  
The last time they were all together, they all guilted and ragged on Drogo so much — supposedly for being so ashamed of them for not being rich or fancy or white enough — that Drogo got fed up with all of the shit-talking and loudly invited them over to his house. Drogo promised them that his wife will be there — and she will show them! She will show them why Drogo is ashamed of her sometimes!

They all meet beforehand for dinner because there’s a gate code that Grey doesn’t feel comfortable just giving out even though they are all old friends. They also meet up because while he was told there’d be appetizers and finger foods at the party, he is not entirely sure that it would be enough for Balaq, Tal, and definitely not Xhondo. This is why he chooses an unfussy pizza place, where calories are easy to come by.

The place smells like garlic, bread, and cheese. He was never able to eat this way with Missandei because bread and cheese are Missandei-poison. He leans forward with his elbows on the table as the guys avidly debate which pizzas to get. Grey grins as he sees Yaya walk in.

There is a buy-one-get-one deal on pitchers of beer — which initially feels like stumbling onto a chest of gold, but — as he listens to Xhondo get progressively louder — is ending up feeling like he is bringing a fucking _bomb_ to Drogo and Dany’s house.

In the car, he turns around from the front seat and slaps Xhondo hard on the chest because Xhondo won’t listen to him as he gives them all an impromptu speech about how this crowd is gonna be a tad different from what they’re used to — and some of these people do business with Drogo, so they better not do something that is embarrassing for Drogo.

“Yeah, got it,” Tal says impatiently, pissed that Balaq’s drunk fat elbow keeps jamming into his ribs. Then he says, “Fuck. This is where Drogo _lives?”_

It feels like a scene out of a movie, when the bunch of them walk in. They all have a certain look and vibe. They are all slightly underdressed — but they don’t look sloppy. It feels especially cinematic when Grey gets a good look at the room — at the rest of the crowd — and he slowly shuts his eyes in regret.

Seeing this actually makes Drogo laugh to himself.

Drogo excuses himself from the group he was talking to make his way to the front door, where Dany is already admonishing Grey for being late. Drogo hears Grey say, “Man, I’m sorry, Dany. I didn’t realize the start time was like . . . a for-real thing.”

Dany is saying, “My email was super clear.”

When Xhondo registers Drogo’s presence, he loudly says, “Oh shit! Drogo! You _rich_ now, baby? How much did this house cost?”

As he goes around giving and receiving hugs as well as making quick introductions between Dany and the rest of them, Drogo quickly realizes that most of them are at least a little bit drunk. He peeps a look at Grey’s face, to try and figure out how this happened — but Grey is busy glaring at Xhondo, who is just really blithely unaware that he is already pissing Grey off.

Drogo tells Dany that Kojja is his girl from track. He tells Dany that Balaq was team captain, a senior when they were freshman. Xhondo was a lineman. Like Grey, Tal was a running back. He tells Dany that Alayaya is his girl from this one art class they once took together — because he is careful not to say that the only reason he knows this broad is because she used to date Grey.

Dany lets him make the introductions, but after he’s done, she dismissively says, “I remember.” She is also figuring out that they are all a little bit drunk, too. “We all met at our wedding. It’s been a while though. How is everyone?”

“Enchante, milady,” Xhondo says randomly, engulfing her small hand into his massive one, trying to press a kiss to it.

Grey grabs a fistful of Xhondo’s shirt and, with surprising strength, yanks Xhondo backwards before his mouth can make contact with Dany’s hand. Grey hisses, “Stop _it!_ Don’t kiss women you don’t know that well!”

“Ah,” Balaq says. “Life advice from Torgo Nudho.” Then he mutters something indecipherable in Summer Tongue — making a few of the others chuckle, making Grey’s frown deepen.

 

 

  
Grey pulls Drogo aside when he gets the first chance to. He tells Drogo that he’s really sorry for bringing a bunch of hammered people to Drogo’s fancy-pants party. He tells Drogo he thought this was like, a regular party? He thought it was drinks and snacks — instead of like, cocktails and hor d'oeuvres. He says that it’s his mistake, because he didn’t clarify with Dany or ask about dress code.

Drogo suppressed his smile during Grey’s explanation. He doesn’t love how polite and careful they still are with each other right now. But he loves that this happened, and he loves that Grey is here. He loves that everyone is drunk. He loves that Dany taunted him before proclaiming in his face that Grey RSVP’d yes.

Drogo pats Grey on the shoulder. He says, “Hey, man, don’t worry about it. You guys are really livening up the place. It was a little boring before you showed up.”

And then Grey says, “Oh, whoa! Is that Jaime?”

Jaime manages to pick out his name from clear across the room. Jaime is holding up a wine glass in his good hand. He hollers and says, “Hey, buddy! Long time no see!”

 

 

  
Tyrion is taken aback when he sees Alayaya and Kojja walk into the room. Alayaya has wild hair, sexual confidence, and assessing eyes as she takes in the party. Kojja has this clear sense of zero-fucks-given confidence as she wryly smiles to herself, gazing at Drogo’s house. Tyrion mutters, “Whoa, who are they — and will someone introduce me?”

Yara laughs, nudging him with her hip. And absolutely because Missy has insistently proclaimed that she does _not_ want to fuck Grey — over and over — and because Yara can only go off what has been very clearly communicated to her — Yara casually tells them, “Oh, that’s Kojja and Alayaya. They all went to high school together, I’m pretty sure. And Grey used to date Alayaya.”

“Which one is Alayaya?” Tyrion asks.

“Oh, the smokeshow — the one that presents more conventionally feminine, I mean.”

“Shit,” Tyrion says.

“I’ll introduce you guys,” Yara says.

 

 

  
Missandei can’t think of an excuse fast enough — for why she has to run the fuck away — so she generally stands frozen in place as Yara digs her way through the thick, well-dressed crowd and goes to retrieve Grey’s really beautiful female friend and his really beautiful _ex-lover._ Tyrion is grinning up at her — just completely unaware that she is dying inside, over and over right now. He gently nudges her hand and gently taps her martini glass with his wine glass. He says, “Cheers, hon,” as he knocks back a sip. He also says, “You also look really pretty tonight. I like this dress. Is it new?”

 _“No,_ it’s not new, _Tyrion!”_ she says, clearly distraught.

“Oh, I apologize,” he says carefully. “I shouldn’t have made assumptions about your dress.” Like Drogo, he is also trying to fight and claw his way back into his friend’s good graces.

Yara comes back with her arms around Alayaya and Kojja’s waists. She seriously deposits them in front of Missandei and Tyrion. She cheerfully says, “My friends wanted to meet you guys because they think you look cool and beautiful!”

“Um, you ladies also look very smart,” Tyrion offers, already lightly laughing, already being charming.

“You’re Missandei, right?” Alayaya asks, leaning forward to grab Missy’s hand in a short shake.

“Oh, um, yes. How did you know?”

“Because he talks about you sometimes,” Alayaya says smoothly, smiling.

What. The fuck.

“Does he . . . talk about me?” Tyrion asks.

 

 

 

 

 


	25. Missy is jelly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy watches the future love of her life get on well with his ex, and she completely loses her shit over it. Grey is having a pretty fun night, until the future love of his life just ups and decides to give him a nice big slap in the face.

 

 

  
Missandei learns that Alayaya has a cool person’s job and not a nerd-job like Missandei has. Alayaya is an image consultant. When Tyrion asks what exactly an image consultant does, Alayaya smoothly explains that she helps her clients strengthen their personal brands so that they can achieve their goals. When Tyrion asks her how she got into this line of work, Alayaya lays down this _insanely beautiful_ and tragic speech about how her parents came to this country with no money, how her dad was a janitor and how her mom made do. They were very poor and had to bounce from apartment to apartment every time they were evicted.

Alayaya is all practiced charm and ease as she tells them that from a young age, she was told that she didn’t matter and that she was worthless. It was a message that she really internalized and took to heart. She _believed_ that she was worthless.

But then she met a person who made her believe that she was worth something. Because of him, she was inspired to slowly start working hard to turn her life around. She started to accept that she is not powerless in her own life. She saved all of her pennies and studied for hours. She put herself through college. She started going to therapy and healing. There was a moment in her life where she thought she was going to become a psychologist, but she discovered a certain kind of business acumen that was unique. Her first clients were just her friends that wanted her advice dressing for interviews or dressing for important presentations and meetings.

Alayaya folds her hands casually in front of her as she shifts her weight on her heels. And then in a voice that belies her easy stance, she confidently states, “That’s what an image consultant does. I help match people’s beautiful outsides to their beautiful insides. I help them envision what _can be,_ and I help them take steps towards achieving it.” She is smiling as she asks, “And what do you guys do?”

“Oh, we actually work together,” Tyrion says, gesturing between himself and Missandei.

“We make video games,” Missandei says dully, staring at Alayaya. “Mostly the kind where women have big boobs and men are gangsters who punch down hookers for points.”

Tyrion looks stunned over this incredibly terrible summary of what it is they do, as he carefully glances at Missandei. He says, “That’s not what we do at all.”

But Missandei has already moved on. Her mood is strange and unfriendly as she pivots her attention and says, “What do you do, Kojja?”

Kojja is looking at Missandei warily. She still says, “Photographer.”

 

 

  
She holds up her martini glass and excuses herself — without citing a reason — but they all just assume she’s going off to refill her drink so she can be a cranky drunk somewhere else.

In the kitchen, she starts making herself a new drink because she doesn’t feel like hunting down Dany and pulling her away from Drogo’s friends. In the kitchen, Missandei realizes she doesn’t even know what goes in a martini besides gin and maybe vodka?

So she starts dumping a bunch of gin and vodka into her glass. She fishes out a few olives and throws them in there.

It completely tastes like shit when she takes a sip, but she’s not all that surprised because she kind of expected it to taste like shit.

 

 

  
Alayaya completely knows that Missandei currently hates her guts so much right now. The reasons why are mystifying to everyone else because — they tell her — Missandei is usually really, really sweet and kind of shy and quiet. Yaya has been smiling politely at all of the bewildered excuses Missandei’s friends have made for her — because _they_ are actually very sweet themselves. Alayaya is not concerned at all. Because she generally already knows why Missandei took an instant dislike to her.

She feels this sense of hopefulness — this optimism in the air as she walks through the very glam party and looks for him. Part of all of this reminds her of prom — with the chandelier, the high ceilings, the way music fills up the cavernous space.

She grabs his hand and gently yanks him backwards, away from Drogo, his wife, and Xhondo. She smiles at them all and tells that she’s going to steal this one away for just a moment.

He’s looking at her questioningly. It makes her think that he might’ve been the very best thing that has ever happened to her. She feels unexpectedly emotional about it, as she tells him, “Let’s see those dopeass moves.”

It’s an inside joke. It’s an old joke about how he got his dope moves from his father.

It makes him smile and laugh silently. He acquiesces and follows her a little deeper into the living room. Absolutely no one else in the room is dancing right now. This might not even be a dancing sort of party, but the music is lounge-y and laidback and they can make this work.

People clear some space for them — people smile at them. She will always miss the way people look at the two of them together.

He feels familiar in her arms. When he touches her, she locks right into the past — she feels young again. As she holds onto him, she thinks that it’s probably a good time to stop punishing herself for all of the stupid and destructive mistakes she has made because she was so unhappy with herself when she was young.

She breaks the rhythm because she ends up holding him too close and too tightly. He’s trying to look at her face as he holds her hand. He says, “Is everything okay?”

She nods. She says, “Yeah, everything is great,” as she stares adoringly at him. She’s also thinking that Kevin is really nice, and she has been making really great progress in changing old habits. She doesn’t always have to go for men who are dark and who are more than a little bit tortured. She doesn’t have to be a person who is always trying to fix other people as a point of distraction, so that she can avoid dealing with herself.

She starts quietly singing to the song, into his shoulder. He hears her and he starts quietly singing along, too. It’s going to be this kind of thing that she will miss the most.

 

 

She finishes her second drink in record time — just in time to make herself a third shitty drink and to watch the show. She's leaning against a wall to help keep herself upright — she is literally being a wallflower — and even she has to privately concede to herself that they look kind of perfect together. Like, they look beyond perfect together.

She knows she is being ridiculous. She knows she has no claim over him. She knows that he actually owes her nothing. Nevertheless, she still tortures herself by wondering if he was just being _fucking nice_ and _charitable_ all of the times he made her whole fucking day just by looking at her.

She thinks back to his bleeding knuckles. The claustrophobic thickness between them, in her car. She thinks about how she just closed her eyes and felt that terrible dread in the pit of her stomach, as she just risked _so much_ and told him that she likes him so much. She likes him so much that she thinks about him all the time.

Up until now, she kind of didn’t understand why people get so hung up on sex. She made certain assumptions about him, maybe, because she thought they were kindred spirits.

But right now, as she’s watching him dance with a woman who is everything she can’t be, she understands that she was presumptuous.

 

 

  
Grey ends up getting grabbed a lot while at the party. He gets grabbed and volleyed around to different people and different groups. Jaime grabs him to introduce him to his friend Brienne, for instance. They briefly talk about eating horse meat — of all things — before Drogo pulls Grey away to push him in front of Daenerys to verify to her that it is true — that when Drogo was fourteen or fifteen, he wrote a really good poem about his deadbeat dad leaving their family and it ended like, winning an award and getting published in a newsletter somewhere. It was Drogo’s first and last bit of published work.

Grey gets to tell her, “Yeah, that totally happened.”

Which results in Drogo exploding loudly into his wife’s face, going, “See! Why would I lie about that! Why? _Why?_ The internet wasn’t robust yet! I’m still a motherfucking poet! You’re married to a motherfucking artist!”

Tal gets competitive at one point and grabs Grey to try to get Grey to jump over a broom handle and land on Dany and Drogo’s couch. Grey is like, “What? No!” And after that, he learns that Kojja was talking shit and telling Tal that Grey was always a better high jumper than Tal ever was.

Yara tries to get him to punch her, and she is drunk enough that he doesn’t even ask her why. He just doesn’t agree to it. He just takes her glass out of her hand because he’s afraid she’s going to tip it over and pour alcohol all over Dany and Drogo’s carpet. He hands the glass over to Obara who, he realizes belatedly, is also plastered. He tells Yara, “No, I’m not going to punch you.” Then he takes the glass away from Obara and keeps it in his own hand.

Yara wails, “Why not!” And then she drunkenly tells all of them a really charming story about growing up an angry little lesbian in the Iron Islands and how it was great because the best she could aspire to be was some stupid fuck’s rock wife and hope that her stupid fuck of a future husband wouldn’t cheat on her with whores _too much_ and give her AIDS to _die from._ She ends her fun story with, “But joke’s on everyone.” She points to herself. “I get so much tail now.”

“What?” Obara says, scrunching up her face. “No, you _don’t.”_

“I meant _before_ we boo’d up, babe.”

It takes him fucking _forever_ to make his way to Missandei. It feels like it has taken him fucking _hours,_ just to get to her because all of these people are just conspiring against him.

He absently sucks down Yara’s drink — and stops himself from spitting it back out because it tastes like pure peppermint schnapps with just one ice cube in it. He groans as the viscous, sugary liquid burns its way down his throat. He presses his fist over his mouth so he doesn’t gag, so his gag doesn’t turn into an accidental vomit.

He find her hanging out by herself in the kitchen, next to a half-empty bottle of vodka. He knocks on wall to get her attention — and to give her warning. He’s not planning on scaring her tonight. He just quickly walks up to her and releases this grateful smile as she turns her face up to look at him. He feels _such relief_ — as his heart starts to pound and his head starts to throb. He is thinking that she fucking looks so _great._ He presses his hand to his sweaty forehead because this party is _hot_ and needs more air circulation. He says to her, “Hey! What’s the good word!” as he reaches out to lightly touch her wrist. He raises her up arm with two fingers as he looks down at her dress. She is wearing red today — which is different. All he can say about this is, “You look beautiful.”

Her eyes flicker — they harden.

It makes him do a double take, because the response is just so unexpected.

And then she gently pulls her hand away and drops it back to her side. She doesn’t say anything after that — she is just avoiding eye contact with him. Her mouth is in a tight line.

Oh.

He gives her the benefit of a doubt. He says, “Hey, is everything okay?”

“Everything is totally fine,” she says, her voice low and quiet and just utterly _pissed._

“Um, okay,” he says carefully. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, positive.”

“Okay,” he says — reluctantly. “It just honestly doesn’t seem like everything is okay. You seem kind of upset.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, man,” she says, finally looking him in the face again. Her voice is just an emotionless void. She says, “Everything is great.”

He stares at her in disbelief. And he is completely _positive_ that he has done _nothing_ to her besides be super _pleasant_ and _friendly_ and nice to her. He says, “Did I do or say something to make you angry with me?”

“Nope,” she says, continuing to freeze him out.

And that is it for him.

All the times that he worked so hard to not roll her eyes at her — he makes up for it now. He rolls his eyes at her — so fucking _hard_ — because he’s _over_ this shit.

He resents being treated like this when he’s done jack to her. He resents being talked to like this. He doesn’t waste his time anymore, and he doesn’t let himself get fucked with anymore.

This is why he says, “Okay, then — later,” as he spins around and just leaves. He picks a direction, and he just starts walking.

 

 

  
The last time she loved a guy, she was sixteen years old, and she didn’t get the opportunity to love him for very long because like, his parents were racist and her parents were overprotective — two things that were hard for their love to overcome because they weren’t Romeo and Juliet — and he was a coward who was bad at standing up to his racist parents and she was a coward who couldn’t stand up for _herself._ His thing was way worse though. The racism was way worst.

Her lack of practice in dealing with these kinds of relationship nuances and emotions is coming out. She drank because she felt bad. She didn’t know not to drink so much when she is emotional. She cannot gather her bearings fast enough. She cannot figure out that she is pretty fucking jealous and she is just not responding to it elegantly at all. She cannot see that all of the terrible things she is drunkenly telling herself in her head have no basis in truth at all — that he has not done anything bad to her at all. Rather, she just keeps telling herself that he tricked her and he fooled her and he treated her like she’s some kind of idiot, and he probably mocked her behind her back with this gorgeous-ass woman that he has in his life, that he has never told her about because he is a liar who cannot be trusted.

Missandei tells herself that she’s utterly _sick_ of being a doormat. She’s _sick_ of feeling like she has no power in anything. She is _sick_ of the way men look at her. She is _sick_ of the drawings that they circulate about her. She is _sick_ of having to choose her words so carefully and with so much paranoia, because she is just so flawed and so fucking weird and so awkward.

So she follows him to the bathroom. Right as he gets to the door, she taps him on the shoulder. He looks back — and he looks shocked to see her angry face. He is utterly stunned when she tells him, “You’re an asshole!”

When she tells him this, he immediately looks around and spots people loitering nearby, so he grabs her arm — she starts trying to yank it away — and he drags her into a nearby dark room. It is Dany and Drogo’s office.

He doesn’t bother turning on the lights. He just asks her, “What the fuck is your fucking problem tonight?”

His aggression hits in a really visceral way — she gets these flashes of her dad being angry with her mom — or her mom being angry with her dad. She touches her face as she shouts at him. She says, “You just walked away from me!”

“I thought we were done talking.”

“I don’t mean — not just _now._ I mean you walked away from _me_ and _us!”_ she shouts. “You got out of my car and you _left me.”_

His head actually bobs backwards, like in a slow-motion ricochet. He’s looking at her like he doesn’t even know her. He’s looking at her like she just pulled off a rubber mask, and he is learning that the wonderful person that he has gotten to know over the past year wasn’t real at all. He says, “What the fuck — are you talking about?”

“I told you that I liked you!” she shouts, gesturing passionately at herself. “I told you that I think about you all the time! I told you that I thought you were amazing, and that I really liked _being with you!_ Like, do you know _how hard_ it was for me to say that? And you just _rejected me.”_

“That’s what you think happened?” he asks incredulously.

“Who is Alayaya!”

“What! She’s —”

“Why did you encourage my feelings for you if you were already seeing someone —”

“— a fucking _friend.”_

“Did you just think it was _funny_ to lead _me on?”_

“What? Are you fucking psychotic right —”

“Stop calling me crazy. That is so sexist —”

“I’m not saying you are fucking psychotic because you’re a woman,” he explains heatedly. “I’m saying you’re fucking psychotic because you're saying _fucking batshit —”_

“You’re fucking _insensitive!”_ she shouts.

“— and you’re interpreting facts like — what the fuck!” he shouts back. “Like, now I’m wondering if _I’m_ fucking crazy because the crazy shit you are saying is making me think _I’m crazy —”_

“Like, do you even _realize_ how hard it was for me to admit my feelings for you?”

“What fucking feelings, Missandei! You have fucking _feelings?”_

This is the statement that makes her tear up. Her lower lip starts to quiver and she has to look away from him even though she knows that he hates it when she cuts eye contact. She has to look away because she will definitely start crying from being so fucking ass hurt if she looks at him. She looks at the dark wall and she quietly says, “I can’t believe you just said that. I care about you so much.”

“But the thought of having sex with me totally disgusts you.”

“I _never_ said that,” she says. “I would _never_ say that.”

“Okay, so you’re polite about it. Good for you,” he says in derision. Then, after a brief pause, he adds, “Just let me move the fuck on, Missandei.”

And then — they finally hear the cautious knocking on the door.

They don’t realize that there has been knocking on the door for the past few minutes, because their shouting blocked out the sounds.

This is just fucking great. Grey thinks that everything is just so fucking great, as he walks over and opens the door.

He finds Dany and Drogo are on the other side. Dany, in particular, just looks uttering miserable — so he quickly surmises that they heard just about everything.

Dany holds up her phone. She grimly says, “I’m so sorry for interrupting, but Missandei, your brother has been trying to reach you. He just called me looking for you. He needs you to call him right away. I think something bad happened.”

 

 

  
They all stand around mutely in the office — in the dark — as Missandei quickly starts reading the text messages that Mars left for her after her phone went to voicemail.

Her vision goes blurry and her hands start to shake as she blearily tells them, “Um, Moss got shot. At work. Um, he’s still alive. They’re at Northwestern. That’s it. That’s all the info I got.” She sighs and she drops her phone from her face. She blankly stares into the faces of her friends. Slowly, with a lot of control, she says, “Um, I have to go.”

“I’ll drive you,” Dany says quickly. “Just let me grab a jacket and my keys and we’ll go together —”

“Actually, I want to take her,” Grey says to Dany. And then to Missandei, he says, “Let me drive you. He’s my friend, too.”

Missandei sighs. She can’t really make a decision right now. So she says, “Okay.”

 

 

 

 


	26. Moss is okay!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey meets the family of the future love of his life under some really trippy and stressful circumstances. Missandei sees her parents for the first time after breaking their hearts.

 

 

  
Mars doesn’t answer his phone on the drive to the hospital. The line just keeps ringing and ringing and ringing until it eventually goes to voicemail. Both of her parents’ phones don’t even ring. They are going directly to voicemail. On her screen, she sees Moss’s name and number underneath Mars’s in her contact list, and she almost stupidly calls him, too — before she remembers that he’s obviously not going to pick up — so she starts silently crying over that.

She tries to call Safi, but it goes to straight to voicemail, too. Finally, she calls Zoya, who does pick up. Zoya is quiet and tells Missandei that she’s at home watching all of the kids. They are confused about why there’s an impromptu sleepover — they haven’t been told what happened yet because Safi doesn’t want to freak them out and worry them. Zoya says she doesn’t know what is going on beyond what Missandei already knows, but she does ask Missandei to give her updates — and also to keep an eye on Mars for her, because he’s so close to his brother.

Missandei tears up again as she nods, even though Zoya can’t see it, and she says bye before hanging up.

 

 

With alcohol still saturating her blood, Missandei just about freaks out on the emergency room front desk lady because the admittance lady is on hour twelve of double-time shift and gives no fucks about Missandei’s problems because many people have a loved one who could be dying in this hospital. Everyone still has to wait their turn. It is only a few minutes.

Missy says, “Are you _serious_ —”

“Hey,” Grey says softly, quickly running his hand over her shoulder blade so that she remembers he is still there. Her focus has been very narrow and very singular. He tells her, “I’ll wait in line. Why don’t you just sit down and try calling Mars and your folks again?”

She does not respond to this or register that she even heard him. But she _does_ walk off toward a chair, turning on her phone screen again.

 

 

  
They have to walk across an entire wing and get a little lost going up four floors before they find the correct waiting area. Missandei spots her parents first — because Grey does not know what they look like — and she is stumbling a little bit in her heels and sobbing as she runs up to her mom and says, “Mommy,” before she throws her arms around her mom. They are crying a lot and tightly hugging each other before they reach out and pull in Moss’s wife, who also starts crying again — as Grey hangs back a little bit.

Mars, who isn’t in uniform, then slowly stands up, patting his dad on the shoulder in the course of doing so, and he says to Missandei, “Jesus Christ, learn how to pick up your fucking _phone.”_

 _“You_ learn how to pick up your phone!” she immediately snaps, pulling away from their mom for a quick moment.

“Guys,” their dad says, launching a pretty weak effort at calming them both down. He is tired. He was woken up and pushed out of bed because his son could have died tonight.

“We were talking to his doctor,” Mars tells Missandei pointedly. “He’s going to be totally okay, by the way. Real lucky fucker. He needs surgery on his shoulder though.”

Her already wet face crumples at that, as she reaches out and tries to hit Mars with her fist. She says, “What the fuck! Lead with that next time!”

“Why do you smell like a distillery?”

 

 

  
He quietly takes the one of the last empty seats in the waiting area, on the other side of Mars, kind of farther away from the nucleus of everything, which is probably for the best because he feels thoroughly out of place. He gets little acknowledgement — no one bothers doing introductions — save for a quick pat on the knee from Mars, before Mars leans forward and feeds Missandei information that he has already fed the rest of the family.

Moss and his partner got shot because they were executing a search warrant but went into the wrong apartment. An investigation led them to what they thought was the address of a drug dealer, but it was actually the home of a man and his family. The family was home but didn’t hear when Moss knocked on the door. Because there was no response, Moss and his partner started unlocking the locked door. The man, who did not hear Moss and his partner announce themselves, did hear them trying to break into the house. He thought it was a home invasion, so he took his shotgun and told his family to lock themselves in a bedroom. He fired his shotgun right when Moss and his partner opened the door, hitting Moss in the shoulder and nicking his partner in the arm. Moss’ partner returned fire, but luckily no one was hit. Once the man realized that they were police officers he immediately dropped his weapon and surrendered.

Mars’ phone buzzes — he turns it on to look at it. Then he nudges his dad on his other side and states, “Chief is _pissed._ I hope Mossy and Karen don’t get disciplined for this. I mean, you’d think that getting shot is enough punishment for this oopsie.” Mars wryly chuckles.

“I don’t think this is _funny_ at all, Marselen,” their mom says heatedly, angrily. She generally hates that both of her sons took after their father and followed him into a dangerous line of work that senselessly puts their lives on the line all the time — for people who don’t even value their lives enough. She _hates_ that she spent so many years worried about her husband and now she has to continue spending the rest of her life worried about _this very thing_ with her sons.

“Ma, he’s _okay,”_ Mars says. “And it’s a little bit funny.” On his end, his mom’s inability to see the gray areas in life continues to be taxing. His mom’s general humorlessness is tiring.

“I knew this would happen!” she declares, shouting at him as Safi flinches. “I _knew_ this job would be the death of us all!”

He thinks this is incredibly overdramatic. This job is actually just the death of a few of them, not all of them. He sarcastically says, “You predicted that your son would get shot entering the wrong apartment during a drug search? That’s impressive. Do you know tomorrow’s lottery numbers, too?”

“Marselen,” their dad says warningly — but also tiredly. He has been trying to manage his wife’s hysteria for the past couple of hours — she only calmed down when she learned that Moss was going to be okay. “Give your mother a break from you. Shut your face for just a goddamn minute.”  
  
Mars actually _does_ listen to that. He shrugs. He clears his throat and he leans back, slouching in his seat. He shuts his eyes and appears to be resting.

And then, gradually over the course of an hour, more people filter in and out of the waiting area. Moss’s partner shows up and sits with them briefly, with a bandage over her bicep. She recounts the same exact story again, no longer stunned by it — just regretful that this mistake happened.

More police officers show up really quickly in the middle of their shift to say hello to their dad, to pay quick respects to the old man, and also to give quiet assurances to Moss’s wife, as news of Moss and Karen’s shooting spreads through the precinct. A few higher-ups also show up, including the deputy chief, who seems like a nice woman and pretty amiable in light of what happened. She has a private conversation with Mars and their dad for a few minutes before she shakes their hands and walks down the hall.

A doctor comes out to tell them that Moss is now out of surgery and is in recovery. Everything went really well. He is coming out of sedation and is already awake, but groggy. They are told that Moss has to be kept in the hospital under observation — and that the surgery to further repair his shoulder will need to be scheduled for Thursday.

Moss’s wife says, “I want to see him. Can I see him now?”

Grey tries to hang back, out in the waiting room as Missandei’s family members filter into the small recovery room nearby, because it still really seems like he’s just some stranger intruding on this deeply personal thing that has happened to them — but Mars heavy hand claps him on the shoulder and Mars physically ushers him into the room. He pulls himself far away, to the toilet, because he wants to give the family their space.

Moss is hooked up to an IV and a machine. He is in a hospital gown and his shoulder is thick with white bandages. He actually looks remarkably good. He tells them that he’s not in pain yet. He says yet like he knows that it is all temporary.

In the room, their mom is clutching onto Moss hand and talking a mile a minute about how she prayed for him, as Moss’s wife grabs his face and starts crying into it. He is sleepily trying to nicely swat her off as he says, “Baby, baby, baby, _baby!_ Get off me. God, I love you so much. I’m totally fine.”

And then she says, “You idiot!”

“Okay, this _really_ wasn’t my fault!” he says defensively. “We got _shit information.”_

 

 

  
At some point, after they are very much assured that Moss will be fine — after Moss reminds them that he is sometimes annoying by being a tad annoying — it actually gets a little boring being in the hospital, waiting for really predictable trickle updates, waiting for the nurse to come back in to check in on him. Moss retells the story again — and there’s not really new information, other than the fact that he knew he was going to get shot a split second before he was shot. He tells them he actually remembers seeing the shotgun and going, oh shit, in his head before he rolled.

This is something their dad and Mars can relate to — though Mars has never been shot before — so the three of them start grimly trading stories, perversely laughing over all of these close calls and marveling at how procedure used to be so different back in the day. Their dad casually mentions how sometimes calling for backup wasn’t at all a guarantee that he’d get backup. Their dad casually says sometimes he arrived in situations where he was sure he was going to die. He tells this story about his white sergeant once told the entire precinct that he wasn’t going to waste an officer on a negro. Their dad laughingly tells them he had to get into his boss’s face and be like, “You want to go with me, motherfucker? I’ll beat the ever-loving shit out of you.” And after that, it was a little bit better because he had a little bit more of their respect. They figured out that he wasn’t going to let them push him around. He casually says, “You have to take respect from people sometimes.”

Moss is biting back a smile as he says, “Pop, that was really inspirational.”

Their dad laughs. He says, “Shut up.”

Their mom says, “Can we _please_ talk about something else?”

So they appease their mom and they start talking about the kids. Safi tells her husband that the kids don’t know he’s been shot yet. They start blandly discussing between themselves about how much of the truth to tell the kids. Chako is probably old enough to handle most of it. Rani might need to be shielded a little bit — but actually, Chako always ends up blabbing and terrorizing his little sister with the truth anyway. Moss tells the rest of them that he was shocked when his daughter told him she already knew why two boys in her preschool class were kissing. It is because they are gay for each other. Moss tells them that he and Safi had to sit down and have an entire conversation with the both of them about why it didn’t matter if the two boys were gay for each other — but also to stop fucking going around accusing other kids of being gay for each other because it is rude.

In the midst of it all, their mom suddenly and comically realizes that she’s actually angry at her daughter. They have been joined at the hip since Missandei arrived at the hospital, just clutching tightly onto each other’s bodies — but then their mom suddenly she lets go of Missandei’s waist and actually goes, “Oh, you’ve said _terrible_ things to me!”

Missandei looks taken aback. She just responds with, “I’m really sorry, Mom,” as she tries to reach out to her mother again. Her mom gives her the cold shoulder and — because her entire night has been utterly fucking bananas and real dramatic — this low-key, petty rejection from her mother actually doesn’t hurt her at all. She just says, “Oh, okay. So you still mad. That’s cool. We’ll talk later.” Then she says, “Do you guys want something to drink? Water or something?” She starts to tiredly push herself out of her chair.

“I can go get some,” Grey interrupts. “You stay.”

This is when Moss says, “Oh, baby boy! You’re here, too! I didn’t notice you ‘cause you’re so quiet. Oh my God, were you _worried_ about me?”

“Such a weird thing to gloat about,” Grey mutters, pausing at the door. “Yeah, of course I was worried about you.”

“Oh my God, you _love me so much,”_ Moss throws back. “Yo, can you get me some apple juice?”

“Yeah, man,” Grey says. “Um, does anyone want anything else besides water?”

“I’ll take a Coke?” their dad offers.

“Okay, you got it.”

Grey stays a beat too long, looking around the room and waiting for more drink orders. Everyone just stares right back at him blankly. And then he is like, okay, and he mutely spins around in place before ducking out of the doorway.

After Grey leaves, Safi turns to Missandei and immediately says, “He’s _so cute.”_

“I told you,” Moss says, laughing woozily. “He’s _adorable.”_

“Wait, that’s not your friend?” their mom asks, looking at Mars and Moss. “I thought he was your friend.”

“He _is,”_ Mars says, with his arms crossed, blocking light from the doorway. “He’s also Missandei’s _lover._ Didn’t you see them walk in together?”

“I thought it was a coincidence,” their mom says. “As in, they arrived at the hospital at the same time. A lot of people have been coming and going all night. I just assumed he was one of your friends.”

“Oh,” Mars says. “That kind of makes sense. ‘Cause it’s like, why would Missandei bring a date to her brother’s shooting?”

Moss starts giggling in his bed, lolling his head side-to-side. “I know, right? Only a real asshole would introduce her _lover_ to the family while I’m like, hanging onto dear life.”

“Only a real asshole would be like, ‘Oh, you know what’s a fun and sexy activity for us?’ Watching my brother die.”

“Oh my God, enough!” Missandei snaps.

“Seriously, guys, lay off her,” Safi says. And then she reaches out to hold Missandei’s hand. She says, “I love this dress! You look very pretty tonight, actually. Did Moss’s shooting interrupt your guys’ date? That’s a bummer.”

“Not you too!” Missy exclaims to her sister-in-law, just as Moss shouts out, “Baby!” before cracking up.

“Oh my God,” Mars adds, straightening up as he remembers something. “You know what? She totally showed up drunk, too!” Then to Missandei, he says, “Is that why you weren’t picking up my calls? Is it because you were fucking _blasted?”_

“Oh my God,” Moss says. “You almost missed my death because you were off being a dirty drunk.”

“Like father, like daughter,” their dad lightly breaks in.

This just results in like — _intense silence._ About three difficult and strained seconds tick by before Moss awkwardly chuckles and awkwardly says, “Good one, Dad!”

 

 

  
When he gets back with a million water bottles, one Coke, and one apple juice in his arms, he finds that the room is emptier. Missandei and her dad are gone.

He quietly passes out the drinks, ducking his head politely with everyone that he doesn’t know and hasn’t officially met yet, as they politely take his offering and whisper soft thank yous to him.

There is are two open seats now — one of which Mars refuses to occupy because he’d just rather stay standing. So, for the sake of not being utterly fucking weird about it, Grey takes the empty seat next to Missandei’s mom, in between her and Missandei’s sister-in-law. He gives both of them a quick smile as he clenches his hand in a fist and smooths it down his pants.

Then he just sits and wait. It is two in the morning.

 

 

  
As they stroll down the corridor and head toward a glass bridge lined with benches, he solemnly tells her that she really _does_ look very nice. He asks her if she was just somewhere special or something. Missandei generally applies a lot of effort at being honest and open with him, so she tells him that she was at a friend’s party before she got the call. She tells him she _was_ drinking a tad, so she’s sorry for that.

He tells her it’s fine. He tells her that it’s nice that she was having fun.

She’s blinking back tears — because everything just feels so hard sometimes — and she worries that maybe she has just gotten it all wrong.

Because he is searching for something to say to her — because he is having similar troubles with everything feeling so hard — he tries to sound casual as he tells her that Grey seems nice. He seems like a nice young man. He keeps his observation inoffensive and bland — so he doesn’t tell her that Grey also is different from what he was imagining or expecting, not that he even knows what he was expecting for her. Maybe he just expected someone who seemed more like him. But it is probably for the best, that his daughter’s young man is different from him.

She nods and digs her hands into her jacket pockets, as she echoes what he said and affirms that Grey is nice. Then she says, “Dad, I’m really sorry for what I said.”

It kind of makes him suck in a breath. Then, he says, “It’s fine. I think I needed to hear it.”

“No, I’m really sorry for _how_ I said it,” she says.

“I didn’t realize I had done those things to you,” he says, talking over her a little bit, missing about half of her apology. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

“It’s fine,” she says quickly, just really blindly eager to be done with this and to make amends.

“No, it’s not,” he says, sighing.

Then he tells her that he honestly sometimes doesn’t remember _enough_ because he was a drunk. And so while he doesn’t dispute what she remembers, he still feels surprised by it. He tells her that he thought they were better and closer than this — but that was probably just stupidly wishful thinking.

He also tells her that her mother is really seriously pissed at her. He’s generally okay with it, but her mother is really livid. So it’ll take a little bit of time to get back in that woman’s good graces. He ironically chuckles at that. He says, “Trust me. That’s one thing I’m an expert in — getting back into your mom’s good graces.”

 

 

  
It’s almost three in the morning by the time Missandei and her dad make a reappearance. Grey is just hanging out in the same hospital room with her brothers, her mom, and her sister-in-law. Moss has actually fallen asleep, having succumbed to his painkillers and the late hour and the downswing of all of the adrenaline.

Grey has his head pressed against his fist, and he’s also trying to stay awake when she walks back into the room. She gives Moss’s sleeping face a quick kiss as she whisper-talks to her family. Safi is going to stay the night. Their parents want to do the same. Mars is about to take off and head home. She is planning on doing the same.

She holds her hand out in front of his face — he stares dumbly at it — and she says, “Come on, let’s go home.”

Because he’s with her family, he stops himself from saying something like: What the fuck, have you lost your mind? _Again?_

He grabs her hand. He lets her help pull him out of the chair. He hears a couple of soft feminine voices say, “It was nice meeting you, Grey.”

 

 

  
This bitch completely falls asleep on him in the car. She seriously presses her forehead into the window and just starts softly snoring before they even leave the hospital parking lot. He is dumbfounded. He also understands now, that it _is_ annoying when people fall asleep on their friends. He understands why she always got on his ass for falling asleep during movies.

He silently drives her back to her apartment, with the radio turned off because he still wants to just let her rest.

In front of her building, he gently shakes her awake — she needs to punch in the code to open her garage. Her breathy, sleepy voice is disoriented and she kind of swats him off. He tells her that he needs the code to her garage. She just tells it to him. She says it’s two, one, seven, eight.

He also ends up just carrying her dumb ass all the way up to her apartment. He tucks his arms underneath her knees and her torso. She rolls her face onto his shoulder. He hikes her up. And then Grey awkwardly runs into the night doorman, who recognizes Missandei, and Grey is sure that he’s about to be accused of assault or something, because he’s a strange man carrying an unconscious woman up to her apartment. But the doorman just smiles at him and helpfully runs over to the elevator, scanning his keycard for Grey so that the elevator doors close and go up to the twenty-first floor.

He has to put her down for a second as he digs in her purse for her keys. He has to be careful not to clobber her head on the door jamb as he makes his way into her bedroom.

He drops her neatly down onto her bed and he has these grand plans to just take off her shoes, throw a blanket over her, and just take his body and collapse it down on her couch in exhaustion.

He’s in the midst of throwing her blanket over her body when she grabs his wrist though. He catches her staring up at him.

Then her hand transfers to his shirt collar.

He’s like, “Whaaat?” As in, what is happening?

She firmly pulls him down to her. His arm shoots out to brace against her mattress. He’s resisting the pull.

So she raises her face up to his face. She presses her mouth to his as he makes a muffled sound of surprise.

 

 

 

 

 


	27. Missy hollers at her boo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei tries to make a play for the future love of her life with some really bold nudity. Unfortunately that doesn't work, so she has to resort to using her words. Grey loses his cool for perhaps the first time onscreen. It's because the future love of his life is driving him crazy.

 

 

 

  
She tries not to let it sink into her heart — when he basically rips his face and his body away from her grasp. She’s panting as she quickly sits up, following him — as the beginnings of a headache sluggishly bounces in her head. She sucks in a deep breath as she smooths her hands down his warm shoulders, before she uses them to balance, before she pushes herself to her knees so that she is kneeling in front of him.

Her thoughts are muddled and a bit incoherent. She’s remembering snippets from the night, as she reaches down and grabs the hem of her red dress. It is a zipperless, stretchy dress — so it’s easy for her to pull it up — up her bare legs, over her hips, up her stomach, over her breasts, and over her head. She’s speculating that relationships are bit give and take — maybe this is the lesson she is learning from her parents. Sometimes the way people express themselves is esoteric and complicated. Like, she now knows that sex is important to him — it’s more important to him than she ever realized. She reasons to herself that she has had sex before — and she can have it again. It is not at all a hardship, to have sex with someone that she feels such strong feelings for.

He’s saying, “What are you _doing?_ What is _happening_ right now?” He’s scrambling off the bed in a bit of a panic — nearly falling over and slamming down into the floor. He catches himself with a fistful of her blankets. He lands with a dull thud as she drops her dress on the floor.

She reminds herself that people aren’t always right. Dany told her that upon first meeting Drogo — Dany knew that she wanted to fuck him. Before Dany even knew his name, she knew that she wanted to fuck him. When Missandei asked Dany if she’s ever been with someone where the sexual attraction wasn’t immediate, Dany admitted no, she never has. Missandei found that response really foreboding and maybe even scarily prophetic, but Missandei’s trying to get herself naked right now, and such thoughts are counterproductive to what she is trying to accomplish right now. She certainly doesn’t find thought of having sex with him disgusting. Just terrifying and potentially very uncomfortable and awkward. But maybe he is right, and the two things are actually just the same. Maybe she is just a shitty person. She feels bad that he has this impression of her though. She wants to be better than that.

Her hands and arms are shaking as she reaches behind her back and unclips her bra. She tells herself that she cares about him _so much_ and that he won’t hurt her, as she unsnaps the bra and also lets it drop to the ground. She decides to leave her underwear on because maybe he’ll want to take that off later. She also feels really insecure about being completely naked in front of him.

She feels her nipples tighten because they are exposed to the air and they are scared. She instinctively crosses her arms over her breasts, and then she realizes that this gesture looks defensive and not very come-hither. To not give him the wrong impression, she forces her arms back down. And then she nervously just kneels there on her bed and lets him look at her.

He is not looking at her. He is actually averting his eyes and staring off to the side wall in the dark. She hopelessly and sarcastically tells herself that this is exactly how she imagines sex to be — this awkwardness — as she just commits to it and shuts her eyes and shuffles off the bed. She takes a few steps forward. She is going to try and kiss him again.

Because she has shut her eyes, because she is walking blindly, she steps on one of her heels — the fucking terrible buckle and the curved, unsteady shape of it — she ends up tripping. She doubles over — before she collapses nakedly on the ground.

“Oh, wow!” he says, not making a move to come help her back up at all. From his side of the bedroom, he says, “Missandei, are you okay? Damn.”

She hisses out a slow, “Ahhh,” as she awkwardly twists her leg around and pulls her foot to her crotch on the floor. She is thinking that she is still wearing underwear at least, as she shuts her eyes and rubs at the pain.

 

 

  
She puts on some clothes because he actually explicitly asks her to. He asks her, “Hey, can you get dressed?” before he also tells her, “I’m gonna go grab you some ice.”

She is very much looking forward to the humiliation of telling Dany all about this later. She just generally sits cross-legged on her bed in an oversized t-shirt and tries not to descend into more sobbing because she has cried enough.

He makes a stopover in her bathroom and comes back with a plastic baggie full of ice that he encases within a hand towel. He avoids looking at her at first — but then the corner of his eye catches that she’s covered up again — and she can see his entire rigid body relax a little bit. He finally looks at her again. And she wishes that he’d sit with her and would look after her foot even though it’s actually not hurting anymore. But he just drops the ice down next to her and he takes a huge step back. He’s suppressing a yawn. His hand comes up to cover his mouth.

She very, very, very quietly asks, “Why not?” and she hopes that he generally gets it so she doesn’t have to go the extra mile in detailing it out.

He does. He has the audacity to say, “For lots of reasons. You’ve been drinking. We’re exhausted. You blew up at me over _nothing._ Your brother was _shot_ and could’ve _died_ tonight. It’s been a really emotional night. People don’t make the best decisions when they are emotional.” He sighs. He also plainly says, “I also deserve better than this.”

She _does_ start tearing up at that. Her eyes are aching and her body is tired and sore. Her foot is cold. And she tells him that she is sorry. She feels like all she’s been doing lately is saying she’s sorry.

He sees her crying. He actually sees her feeling a little bit sorry for herself. So he tells her something that he has observed and has figured out — something that he has slowly pieced together over the course of the very long night. He softly tells her, “I think that all of the moments that you interpret as rejection — like this moment — I actually interpret as you trying to force my hand.” He quietly asks her, “What did you think was going to happen when you took off your clothes? What did you want to happen? Did you think that your guilt would be absolved?”

 

 

  
She wants to talk about it — she wants to have a real conversation with him about everything, from the mistakes that she has made to the things she wasn’t completely transparent about to the way that she still feels about him — but he tells her what time it is. It is after four o’clock in the morning. He tells her that he _did_ have to get up to take his mom to go get her car looked at, but he has already notified his parents that he’s not going to be able to help them with the car because he’s tied up with her. He does not say this in a romantic way or in a way that is filled with devotion. He says it like he thinks that she doesn’t know how much it costs him — to be there with her.

He just tells her that he wants to go to sleep. He is too tired to talk. He’s especially too tired to have a deep conversation. He asks her for a blanket and a pillow, because he’s going to crash on the couch now.

 

 

  
She generally doesn’t sleep one wink at all — because she is so anxious and because her brain just won’t give it a rest. She can’t sleep because she feels terrible that he is angry with her.

She only starts dozing off around eight in the morning. And by nine o’clock, he is softly knocking on her door, trying to wake her up. Through the door, he tells her that he can take a cab back home — he just wanted to let her know he’s heading out.

She springs up in bed — her mouth is dry as cotton and her eyes are like sandpaper. She is cloudy and unalert, sluggish and clumsy in movement because she is so tired. Her head is also pounding. She is hungover.

She still tells him to wait a minute. She tells him she will put on some pants, and then she will personally drive him home.

He is still so pissed at her — she can tell. Because it’s so obvious that he is pissed at her. Luckily, she has had _so much_ practice lately with people being pissed at her that it’s not the worst thing in the world, honestly. He’s not spitting bile into her face and he’s not drop-kicking her ass with a litany of words that can very easily hurt her feelings. He is just giving her a bit of silent treatment, and this she can easily handle.

She asks him how he slept. He is honest with her and he tells her it was a real shitty sleep. He would’ve rather slept in his own bed. She tells him, “Yeah, sleeping on the couch is the pits,” as she shrugs into her jacket.

She asks him if he wants to grab breakfast — and she has to clarify and tell him that she means with her. She’d like for the two of them to grab breakfast together. He straight up tells her no, he cannot do breakfast. He has to get home and see if maybe he can catch his mom at the tail end of this car situation. Maybe he can pick her up or drive her back to the mechanic.

So Missandei says, “How about dinner then? Do you have dinner plans tonight? Can I see you for dinner?”

He cannot think of a reason why he cannot have dinner with her fast enough — he doesn’t think he has anything going on — but this woman is _fucking exhausting_ so he is wondering if he should take a break from her or something. Maybe he should give it a few days before he opens himself back up for just some more insane-ass mind-fuckery.

In his pause, she says, _“Please.”_

He says, “You know I’m pissed at you right now, right? And you still want to have dinner with me?”

She says, “Yeah, I know you’re pissed. And yes, I still want to get dinner with you.”

 

 

  
His folks are wholly unconcerned that she sort of caused Grey to drop his responsibility to his mom. There was actually a really irrational and stupid part of him that actually expected his dad to yell at her over this. But actually, his parents are all fucking lenient with her and come out of the house all fucking worried, just ready to express concern and to ask her a number of questions about her brother — about what happened and what kind of spirit he is in. Grey’s dad wants to know what is going on with Moss’s shoulder — and she explains it as best as she can. He nods along with her paltry explanation and generously tells her that it really sounds like her brother is going to be just fine.

She apologizes to them, for causing Grey to not come home last night. She apologizes that they had to rebalance their schedules so that Grey’s dad could go with Grey's mom to drop off her car at the mechanic.

His mom frowns and says, “Honey, don’t even worry about it. Are you kidding? I’m _so sorry_ your brother got hurt.”

His dad says, “Have you kids eaten yet? You guys look terrible. Do you want a snack or some coffee?”

“She has to go,” Grey says, answering for her, his face blank but his voice hard. It makes his dad’s face pull into an expression of skepticism and surprise. Grey smoothly explains, “She’s going back to the hospital to be with her family right now.”

 

 

  
After Missandei pulls out of the driveway, his parents follow him back into the house. His dad is trying to crack a dumb joke. His dad is saying, “Hey, rough night?” but Grey isn’t really in the mood at all. He just answers yes, it really was a rough night. He tells his folks that he got very little sleep. He asks them if it’s okay for him to just go lie down for a little bit.

 

 

  
She drowsily stops at a sandwich shop that her dad and brothers love. She generally holds her breath and covers her face with a napkin — looking like a complete lunatic — as she tells the guy behind the cash register that she wants like, eight cheesesteak sandwiches.

After waiting about fifteen minutes for the food to be made, she leaves the shop with two gluten- and dairy-filled bags. They stink up the inside of her car with their delicious-ass poisonous smells.

She bought too many sandwiches. This is what Mars tells her when she arrives, as he eagerly digs into a paper bag and pulls out a wrapped hoagie. He starts pinching the sandwiches in half, for the kids. She gives her nieces and her nephews a big squeeze as they start asking a bunch of questions about the food. She notes that, besides Rani, these children aren’t even that fazed that their dad and uncle got shot — it is _crazy._

Rani is a cuddlebear and has glommed onto her dad. She’s quietly lying in the hospital bed with him. Missandei sidles up to her and pulls out a plastic container. She says, “Guess what, sweetie? I got a rice bowl for you!” It’s actually a poke bowl. She actually has no idea how this child is going to deal with raw fish.

The day ends up being another long day. The kids get restless easily, and so their grandparents decide to go take them on a little outing to a toy and electronics store so that their parents can get a break. When this gets suggested, Mars tiredly speaks up. He tells his dad that he doesn’t want to constantly bribe and distract the kids into behaving with shiny ass things all the time. He tells his dad the kids have enough toys — amid a lot of protest. Kaden is going, “Dad! Come on!”

Mars says, “Nah, just go look at shit. You don’t let your grandparents buy anything, okay? I don’t understand why you think you should get a present just ‘cause your poor uncle got shot. Like — does that even make sense to you, kiddo?”

When they come back about two hours later, all of the kids have new toys. Missandei tiredly laughs in her chair as Mars, Safi, Moss, and Zoya freak out over all of the new stuff that the kids got. Missandei laughs loonily when their dad acts like a total dick and sabotages her brothers’ parenting by telling the kids that grandpa is actually the boss of their dads, so whatever grandpa says goes.

 

 

  
She feels like she might be on the cusp of organ failure or something, as she drags her body from her car up the driveway. They still haven’t decided what to eat yet. He said he didn’t care over text. She told him she’ll pick him up. She is honestly shocked that she didn’t just crash on the freeway on the way over.

She’s sitting in his living room with his parents, waiting for him when he shows up — about two minutes after she arrives. He got a nap in, so he’s slightly less cranky because he’s rested. He still takes one look at her and says, “Whoa.” But not like the romantic kind of whoa. It’s not like, whoa, you are so pretty. It’s more like: Whoa, when was the last time you showered?

She still giggles at that — even though he’s not even trying to be funny. She still stands up to give his parents quick hugs goodbye before she follows him out of the door.

 

 

  
She’s so sleepy that she’s not even hungry. All she’s had to eat all day was half of her niece’s poke bowl. And she’s doing pretty good, anyway. She drives them to the first restaurant she sees, a comfort food restaurant that serves meatloaf, pie slices, and milkshakes. He starts to protest, before they are even fully in the parking spot, but she assures him that she can eat like, a steak. Or a green salad.

She goes for the steak — the super chewy, super overcooked steak. She asks for ketchup to moisten it. He generally picks at his pasta and quietly drinks his water. He is withdrawn and introverted today because he knows what is coming. He already knows what the point of his dinner is, and he has been dreading it.

So she rips the bandaid off. She sleepily yawns. And she says, “I want to date you.”

 

 

  
He tells her that she only wants to date him because she thinks that someone else wants him. She is like a little kid who got her favorite toy taken away. He tells her to rest assured — no one else currently wants him. He tells her that, as fucking annoying as she currently is right now, he will eventually get over it. And her place is his life is not really something she has to protect that fiercely. He tells her that even though she has been a major asshole to him and has made him question her sanity at times — he still likes her.

The way he is talking — she can tell — he has been thinking about this _a lot._ The way he is talking — it sounds like he has an entire speech prepared already.

She is right. Because he soon tells her that he honestly does not want to subject himself to this — to a relationship where neither side is completely fulfilled. He doesn’t want to make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. He says to her, “You don’t have to take off your clothes in order to keep me. I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

In response to this — her body tenses up. She says to him, “I can _try._ I’m willing to _try._ I’m pretty sure I’m . . . becoming open to it.”

He’s remembering all of these lessons imparted onto him by his dad. He remembers his dad telling him that no woman who exists is too good for him. He is actually often too good for _them._ So Grey frankly tells her that he honestly does not want to be her sex-education-for-the-broken-and-the-maimed teacher. He tells her, “In an ideal world, I’d be with someone who actually wants to be with _me._ In an ideal world, I don’t have to be with someone who has to convince herself to be with _me.”_ He tells her, “I don’t want to feel bad about my fucking _body._ I don’t want to feel like I have to _hide it_ or else you’ll freak out. I don’t want to constantly _apologize_ for it. I don’t want to look in your eyes and see fear. I deserve _far better_ than that.”

He actually starts getting angrier and angrier as he passionately details this out.

And Missandei actually resents his tone of voice — and also the content of what he is saying. She is so fucking tired that her brain is too slow and too dumb to think very deeply. It is not capable of being anxious right now. So she doesn’t strategize how to be on her best behavior, so that she is at her most inoffensive. She doesn’t think about his hang-ups and and being respectful about how they talk about his body. She actually just starts heckling him because he’s also been kind of a real jerk to her all day — as if a person cannot be just a little bit confused for just a little while, as if people are just supposed to just know everything about themselves right off the bat.

She tells him, “You’re being a _little bitch._ You haven’t even given me a chance before you’re like, 'Nah, you fail at everything, Missandei.' You’re rejecting me so I don’t even get a chance to reject you. Because you are a little bitch. Who is scared of putting yourself out there. I know you are a little bitch — because _I_ am a little bitch. And it takes one to know one.”

He is totally glaring at her. Awesome.  
  
“So what are you going to do? You’re going to go out there and try to find someone else who will only feel _a fraction_ of how I feel about you — because what? Because she’s had sex with _more than one person_ in her entire life? I’m sorry that I’m inexperienced and don’t have fucking cool sex moves in my repertoire. I’m sorry I don’t know _how it works._ I’m sorry I’m a basic, vanilla bitch. I guess it costs your pride too much, to explain things to me.”

“What the _fuck,”_ he says to her, in disbelief. “Why did you take off your clothes yesterday?”

“You mean this morning,” she corrects.

“The fuck, okay?”

“Because I wanted you to see me.”

 

 

  
After dinner, she drops him back off at his house like a real chivalrous gentleman. She even tries to walk him to the front door, but he’s like, “What are you doing?” and shuffles up there faster than she does, leaving her in his dust.

And then there, on his front stoop, he forces her to make him some promises. He makes her promise that one of them will be brave enough to stop this if they ever feel that it is not working. He makes her promise not to lie to him ever again, because he would rather take the hard truth than to feel like he is too weak for honesty. He also makes her promise that they will stay friends, no matter what happens.

She says, “Okay,” probably way too easily. It looks like it freaks him out.

He nervously says, “Do you have any ground rules for me?”

She says, “None that come to mind right now. Maybe a couple of sex things. But you know what? They are mostly logistical questions. But you know what else? Let’s just cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s just try to keep this _fun_ and _easy_ and _casual_ and _breezy.”_

He mutters, “Oh my God.”

“My parents want to have dinner with you,” she offers. “They want to get to know you better.”

“That sounds terrible. So I’m definitely up for it.” He says, “Man, are you gonna be okay driving home? You really don’t look good, man.”

She says, “Aw, you’re so sweet,” as she pats her hair.

 

 

 

 

 


	28. Missy dates Grey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei is excited and scared to be dating the future love of her life. The future love of her life is just scared.

 

 

 

  
She bursts into Olenna’s office and announces that she is freaking _dating someone!_ She tries to get Olenna to high-five her, but Olenna is old — and also doesn't want to. So Missandei has to high-five herself so she’s not left hanging.

Her confidence cracks after that. Her anxiety shines through as she talks about what it’s like to date someone. For the rest of the session, she tells Olenna all about the things she is already scared of. Like, dating someone is definitely the stuff of her nightmares and also of her dreams. Dating someone is terrifying because neither of them can predict the future. She is not at all secure that he won’t wake up one day and decide to drop her because his parents hate Black people. Or maybe because she’s not pretty enough. Or maybe because she’s just really annoying and clingy and needy. Or maybe because she’s not affectionate or interesting enough. Or maybe because she’s crazy. Or maybe because she’s insecure. Or maybe because there is just no chemistry. Or maybe they just never agree on anything important. Or maybe he gets sick of her health issues and her gluten-intolerance. Or maybe she will never get over her daddy issues and he gets tired of waiting for her to. Or maybe because she has a stomach issue in his presence and he is disgusted that she gets struck down by diarrhea so easily.

There are actually many reasons for him to end up dropping her like a dead weight.

She tells Olenna that, as predicted, sex is just a terrifying monster that hangs over their heads all the time. Grey likes to constantly remind her that they could’ve nipped this whole thing in the bud and stayed platonic friends — but she had to go and fuck it all up by getting naked in front of him. Beyond occasionally verbally slamming her for taking off her clothes in front of him, he has made absolutely zero moves in having sex with her. It is kind of unnerving, because back when she was more on the fence about letting him do stuff to her body, she was really terrified of random boob-grabbing or crotch-grabbing, and then she’d have to carry that knowledge with her. Like, oh, Grey just fucking grabs women’s bits all random like a fucking predator.

But reality is turning out to be very much the opposite of that. He’s very much a gentleman. They haven’t even had a real kiss yet. The times that they have kissed so far, one person was always like, ahhh, oh my God, what are you doing!

She tells Olenna that a part of her just wants to get it over with — sex. The anticipation of it is hard because it’s so up in the air. She tells Olenna that if she had a date marked on her calendar, then that would be great. She could just put it out of sight and out of mind and not even worry about it until the time comes. Missandei asks Olenna, “Why doesn’t he want to have sex with me? I thought that was the point of dating?”

In response to this, Olenna says, “Missandei. You guys have been dating for a week. It’s understandable that he is being a bit cautious.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Missy mutters. “I mean, my brain mostly understands that. But —” She sighs. “What if he figures out that I’m really insecure and need a lot of assurances? What if that grosses him out because he wants me to be more confident than I actually am? What if he just starts discovering my crazy? Because I mean, he recently got a taste and — it didn’t go great. What if — I’m not ready to be in a relationship?”

 

 

  
She tells Yara and Irri about Grey — also in Dany’s presence even though Dany already knows. They are brunching together.

In response to her confession, Yara dryly goes, “I thought you didn’t want to fuck him?” before she rolls her eyes. Nothing surprises her anymore. Plus, she already knows. She knows because she was at the gym with Grey earlier in the week and they went out to dinner afterward. It was a really amazing ramen place with like, these soy-marinated eggs — fucking _delicious_ — and these little caramelized and fried shallots sprinkled on top —

Dany snaps her fingers in Yara’s face to get her to move on with the story — making Yara look like she wants to punch Dany in the jaw for daring to make such a move.

But she refrains from punching Dany. Instead, she tells them that at dinner with Grey, she randomly told him about how her dad will probably never fully accept her and will forever call Obara her friend — and one day, maybe if she’s lucky — maybe her dad will call Obara her roommate.

And in response to that minor confession, Grey told her this story about how he had a track coach who was forever making low-key shitty jokes because he was fast. His coach was a nice guy who encouraged his running and his training really enthusiastically, but he was also always saying stuff like, ‘Oh, he’s so aerodynamic!’ Grey actually hated those jokes because they were being told in front of a bunch of his peers — so he wanted to quit track and even told his parents that he wanted to do fewer activities and quit track. Well, his mom figured out what the real issue was and she threatened to go down to the school and bitch out the coach for being insensitive. But his dad was like, no, don’t do that. His dad also did not let him quit. His dad just made him deal with the coach’s comments by himself. He was so fucking pissed at his dad for leaving him out high and dry. But he ended up just mustering up the balls to be like, ‘Hey, stop making jokes about my injury, fuckturd,’ but nicely, to his coach. He didn’t actually say it like that. And then the coach was stunned and profusely apologized because he didn’t realize that he was hurting Grey’s feelings. Then the comments stopped.

“Oh my God, what is the fucking _point_ of this story, Yara?” Dany asks.

“Oh, he told me, fuck the haters — even when haters are nice people in positions of authority. He also told me my dad is an asshole, and he gets it because sometimes his dad is an asshole. That’s all. It made me feel better because we have things in common.”

“What does this have to do with _Missandei,_ Yara?” Dany says pointedly.

“Oh, nothing,” Yara says.

“What the hell!” Dany hisses. “So how did you already know they are dating?”

“Oh,” Yara says easily. “Because he told me. When we were sharing dessert — these yummy mochi things — he was like, ‘By the way, Missandei and I are seeing each other.’ And I was like, ‘Cool.’”

Dany spontaneously slams both of her hands on the table, rattling their coffee cups, making Irri and Missandei jump. She sneers and grinds out, “You are killing me, _Greyjoy.”_

“You’re such a gossip fiend,” Yara casually drawls. “I was trying to tell y’all a personal, inspirational story, and you only care about the girly stuff.”

Dany gets kind of offended over being called a gossip fiend — even though she completely is one — because she thinks that gossiping is so plebeian. So she insists that she’s not a gossip. She is actually just annoyed at the narrative flow of Yara’s storytelling. She tells them that Yara opened up the story by saying that she knows about Missandei and Grey, _ergo_ it is reasonable to assume that the story she was about to tell was related to Missandei and Grey. When the story ended up not being about them at all, it was very frustrating because it was like Dany had her ears open for a punchline that never came.

Yara exaggeratedly says, “Punchline? _Punchline?_ I was telling you about _my life._ I wasn’t making a joke!” She is just saying these things to get under Dany’s skin. She doesn’t actually care at all. “But I see what you value, Daenerys. I see you.”

“He and I have made out together!” Irri suddenly blurts — just crumbling under the pressure of Yara and Dany’s pretend-fight. Irri is just deciding to confess right away, lest her lack of transparency ruins her friendship with Missandei. She just doesn’t know what is right and wrong anymore. She just doesn’t know. “We’ve _only_ kissed,” Irri says. “And we only touched tongues like, once in the kissing — maybe three or four times.”

Now, it’s Yara who slaps the table loudly. She’s cracking up as her red face sinks down and she almost knocks her teeth into the tabletop. She is gasping as she tells Irri that her timing is just impeccable.

“Well, this is great, guys,” Missandei says, looking into the kitchen. This place has one of those open kitchens that is in the middle of the dining room, so they can see the cooks making food. She looks at the shiny metal cooking vents. And then as information kind of converges together in her brain, as synapses fire, she freezes. And then to Irri, she says, “He kissed you on the _mouth_ — on the _first date?”_

“Yes?” Irri says. Then she clears her throat. She repeats herself. She says, “Yes.”

 

 

  
She peeling and shredding carrots for carrot cake on the floor of their parents' house, in front of the sink when she musters up the guts to super casually and super smoothly tell her brothers that she is officially dating Grey. She has held back her life update until after their parents went outside to heat up the grill and to watch the kids play. It’s not because she doesn’t want to be more truthful with her parents. It’s more that she can’t trust her brothers to keep it classy.

Her heart thumps in her chest as she waits for her brothers’ responses. She doesn’t even really know why their responses even matter to her. She tells herself that she doesn’t need their permission or their approval because that’s some real patriarchal shit. She is just curious. She just wants everyone to get along. She knows that they already like Grey a lot — like, they might even like Grey more than they like her, but maybe they like Grey because they see Grey as a non-threat to her virtue. Maybe their jokes this entire time about her and Grey have been cruel in more ways than one. Maybe they were mocking Grey in addition to mocking her. Maybe the joke was that the two of them together is just fucking comical because she’s very scared of sex and because Grey is unable to have actual sex.

She still remembers the times her brothers told on her to their father because she dressed too provocatively for school. And by that, she means the times she wore open-toed shoes aka sandals to school in the warm months.

She doesn’t even realize she is holding her breath until Mars’ unimpressed tone is like, “No shit, slut,” before he goes back to slicing beef into thin strips with a long knife.

“No, it’s real now,” she protests lightly. “Not this joke you made up.”

“Did I make it up or did I break time and space and just peeped the future like a fucking god?” he asks her wryly.

“I don’t think it’s that,” she says gently.

Moss twists uncomfortably in his sling from his position at the kitchen table. He is no longer any help in food prep because of his shoulder. He has months of physical therapy ahead of him. He says, “Hey, you guys _fucking_ yet? Is it just a lot of oral?”

“Moss!” Missandei gasps, as her face turns kind of warm, as she feels kind of scandalized — but also weirdly kind of energized. She absently thinks that this must be what it feels like to be a teenage boy who is good at sports. She completely missed that boat until now. She takes in a deep breath, and then she says, “We haven’t slept together yet. Um, he’s kind of a prude?”

“Nah, man,” Mars says, just seamlessly correcting her. “That guy fucks. I just know it.”

“How do you know that?” she asks earnestly. “Are there things about him that —”

“It’s a fucking sixth sense!” he snaps back, flashing his knife at her in agitation, annoyed that she’s questioning his authority. “I just know! I am a god!”

“I seriously ask him how he fucks like, all the time,” Moss offers. “I was trying to do recon for you, sis.”

“Thank you?”

“He never answers straight though,” Moss says. “He always says romantic bullshit like how it’s about the _feelings_ and building _intimacy._ But you know what, I bet he’s deflecting because he’s into some _weird shit.”_

“Like what?” Safi asks — trying to be helpful probably — probably unaware that Missandei really does not want to know at all, lest it just makes her even more terrified of sex.

“Like maybe he likes being peed on,” Moss says. “Maybe stuff with safety pins. Maybe he wants to call you his mom’s name in bed. Maybe plugging. Maybe tea-bagging. Maybe stuff with blood. Maybe fisting. Maybe threesomes. Maybe he wants to be held down.” And then more excitedly and more loudly — because Moss is just so jazzed that he’s on a roll and because his wife, brother, and sister-in-law are laughing so much, he shoves out, “Maybe he wants to hold _you_ down! Maybe he likes being slapped! Maybe he likes stuff with fire and candles! Maybe he likes to play Jenga! Maybe he likes watching _you_ get fucked by a _stranger!_ Maybe he likes pretending he’s a cow that needs to be _milked!”_

“Oh my God, please stop,” Missandei says, covering her ears for dramatic effect.

 

 

  
Grey finds that dating her is a lot like being just friends with her — except a million times worse. It is worse because there is just so much pressure to make it work and not blow it, and he can feel himself getting crushed underneath the pressure. He is a shell of his former self around her. He is quiet and bland and boring because he doesn’t want to lose her. But he realizes the irony. He realizes that being quiet, bland, and boring might just drive her away.

He is struggling with affection. He gave her a manly shoulder pat and maybe called her slugger the other day. He is just struggling so hard when he hasn’t struggled before. He is just _so obsessed_ with sex because he’s off his med, and he just doesn’t want to freak her the fuck out with how he feels so he’s been trying to be very, very careful.

He can’t tell if the way he is around her is the exposition of his true self — now that he is almost off his antidepressant — or if the way he is around her is because getting off his antidepressant is proving to be a bit of a failed experiment — because maybe off of his medication, he is just this shitty, cranky, dissatisfied person who cannot retain happiness.

He asks Syrio what he thinks.

“You’re getting out of bed every day right?” Syrio asks, with the whisper of a smile on his face. “You’re getting up and tackling each day, right?”

“Getting out of bed is a really _low bar,”_ Grey says.

“New relationships can be _hard,”_ Syrio says. “It’s hard to be vulnerable in front of someone new. It’s very scary. I think you’re doing great. I know you are trying.”

“Again, trying seems like a really low bar,” Grey mutters.

 

 

  
He tries to keep himself busy and keep three weekdays and one weekend day to himself. He worries about smothering her, a little bit. He worries about exhausting her with his uneventful consistency. He tries to talk to Alayaya about it, but she only laughs and tells him that he is so cute. She keeps telling him to just relax. This does him absolutely no good.

He keeps inviting Missandei to hang out at his parents’ place when they make the time to see each other. He rationalizes this and tells himself that if he is to be vulnerable around her, then he should just be real and show her that he is just a little bit creepily close to his parents. Like, he might as well be living in their basement because he already watches Jeopardy with them probably four days out of the week. He also realizes that he keeps inviting her to his parents’ place because he is self-sabotaging. His dad is a magnificent cockblock and there is very little privacy at his folks’ house. She often politely eats dinner with him and his folks, as his dad flippantly behaves in an overly familiar, overly truthful kind of way with her. For instance, his dad thinks it’s funny to joke with her and tell her that now that she’s actually going steady with his son, he really has got to stop calling her “that bitch.”

It is the very first time ever that Missandei hears herself being referred to as “that bitch” by his father — and it’s completely understandable — the way she does _not_ laugh about it. She does not get the joke, so she doesn’t think it’s very funny at all. Grey and his mom don’t think it’s very funny, either.

Naturally, his dad double downs when people don’t laugh at his jokes. His dad makes it massively awkward by telling them all to just calm down for a fucking minute. He tells them that he only called Missandei “that bitch” when she was yanking Grey’s chain around. He only called her “that bitch” because she was acting like one.

Grey is like, “Wow.”

And Grey’s mom is shaking her head in disappointment.

Missandei says, “Learning this makes me kind of sad. Because I always called you Grey’s dad AKA my buddy. Because I thought you liked me.”

His dad’s face completely drops. He reaches out to grab her hand. He says, “Sweetheart, we _adore_ you. We’re just over the moon that you guys are giving it a real shot. You’re _so good_ for him.”

“Thanks!” she says, her tone suddenly pivoting to cheerful. “I think so, too!

This is when Grey’s dad realizes he has just been fucked with. By a slender woman who cannot even eat bread.

He clears his throat. He straights in his seat. He kind of pulls his hand off of hers because he feels stung and betrayed. He says, “Okay, you bitch.”

She grins at that.

 

 

  
After Jeopardy is over, she gets up, says goodnight to his parents, before she follows him from the living room to his bedroom. This is a new thing for them — hanging out together in the privacy of his bedroom.

She likes to snoop, so she likes to sit on the floor — the twin bed is too small anyway — and she likes to look through all of his childhood stuff under his supervision. She looks through his yearbooks, his clothes, his surprisingly robust collection of puka shell necklaces, and she makes him explain things to her. She is trying to amass more and more information about him, because that just seems like the thing to do. Olenna explained to her that this is the point of dating — to test compatibility and build comfort.

She’s been doing an immense amount of internet research. She wonders if he has been, too — if he’s the kind of person that soothes his own anxiety through information gathering. She’s been researching a lot of stuff about sex. There is not much online that is unique to his situation at all. There is stuff about men who lose their penises to cancer, in the later years of their lives. There is stuff about people who purposely undergo sex reassignment surgery. But there isn’t as much stuff about people who suffer accidents and just lose their penis.

She lays herself directly on the hardwood floor of his bedroom, sifting through his jar of spare change, trying to pull out the big coins so she can count how much money he has in the jar. Her feet are naked and bare — her shoes and socks are by the front door. The floor is a little uncomfortable, pressed hard into her joints, but she doesn’t mind too much. He is lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling.

“How exactly did Drogo shut a door on your penis?” she asks.

“Oh,” he says softly. If he is surprised by the sudden interest, he doesn't comment on it. Instead, he says, “I was playing around with my friends — Tal was there, too. And I was showing them my penis —”

“Why?”

“I honestly don’t know. Because twelve-year-old boys are just idiots? Anyway, I stuck it in the door jamb —”

“It was erect?”

“Yeah — again, we were just really stupid,” he says dryly.

“And Drogo walked by, saw it, and then freaked out and slammed the door on it?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I believe I told him to kiss it before he slammed the door on it.”

“Grey,” she says softly. “That sounds incredibly painful.”

“You’re telling me. There’s a large artery in the penis — and if you can imagine a valve releasing built up pressure on a water cannon — that’s basically what it looked like, when I started bleeding.”

“Did you pass out?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t remember the paramedics at all. Everything after that is a bit of a complete question mark.”

“Drogo must’ve felt terrible.”

“He really did.” Grey says. “He camped out at my house almost every day after school. That’s how we became best friends, actually.”

 

 

  
She asks him how he pees. It makes him laugh a little bit — because this information exchange feels so bizarre and contrived sometimes.

Other times — like now — it feels pretty okay. She shyly tells him she’s been reading stuff about urethral reroutes, which makes him raise his brows in surprise. It makes his pulse jump in his throat, because it makes him wonder what else she has been reading. It makes him wonder if, by asking him how he pees, she is actually asking him how he has sex because a perineal urethrostomy creates a new hole between the scrotum and anus. That hole would be where he pees out of — or ejaculates out of. He is wondering if she is actually asking him how he ejaculates — and then he tells himself to just go fuck himself because he’s being a massive moron right now and she probably hasn’t thought that far ahead.

He is right though. Her question is actually a question about what his body looks like and where he climaxes. She is just too shy and nervous and scared to be direct about it.

He presses the side of his face into his pillow and he tells her that he didn’t need a urethral reroute. He lost maybe eighty, ninety percent of his penis, which means he has about ten, twenty percent left, which is not that much, but it’s enough to keep him peeing standing up if he wants to. He tells her that his pee isn’t as directable as it used to be, so peeing can make a bit of a mess if he’s not careful.

In response to this, she says, “Oh.”

And his face just continues to throb. Into his pillow, he muffles his voice a little bit and he tells her it’s his turn to ask her a question.

He actually wants to ask her if the questions and his answers are changing how she currently feels about him — if anything has changed for her in terms of attraction — is it going up or is it going down or is it staying the same? He kind of wants to know so that he knows whether or not to adjust how he presents — but then he fucking reminds himself that he doesn’t need to adjust. Who he is is perfectly fine. He’ll just fucking die alone forever and just watch her eventually go off and fall in love with some basic asshole because Grey already made the fatal mistake of making her promise him they’d be friends no matter what happens. At that point, he didn’t account for how _he’d_ feel, having her in his face all the time after she breaks him.

But he doesn’t have the guts to ask her how she currently feels about him. Instead, he asks her how old she was when she got her first period.

She laughs loudly, with her body curling a little bit tighter from the surprise of it all.

Into his wall, it makes him say, “I honestly don’t care that much, but I just wanted to ask you a personal, body-related question, you know? It’s weird if you ask me about my plumbing and then I’m like, ‘Oh, what was your favorite vacation spot growing up?’”

“I was eleven years old,” she starts. “And it came out of nowhere. I just noticed that my underwear was extra damp. And then when I pulled down my pants, I was so shocked and embarrassed. I thought that it was coming way too early — I was only eleven!”

 

 

 

 


	29. Missy's mom doesn't love Grey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy officially introduces her parents to the future love of her life. Her mom is not impressed. Also, Missy kicks the future love of her life out of her apartment because a girl needs her privacy sometimes.

 

 

 

She overthinks the shit out of officially introducing him to her parents because she just so badly wants for it to go well, and she’s still on pretty thin ice with her mom. Missandei decides to do it more privately, so she doesn’t invite her brothers or their families because it can get chaotic with all of the kids. Plus, she does not want her brothers confusing their parents with all of their stupid commentary.

She also doesn’t want her mom to have to cook dinner because her mom has to cook almost all the time. She doesn’t want her mom to have to clean up after them as the men sit at the table and gab. She wants her mom to have her time with Grey and she wants her mom to really get a chance to know him.

Also, sometimes her dad doesn’t behave in restaurants because he gets a little uptight about service all the time. She doesn’t want Grey to see her dad being a bad tipper. She doesn’t want Grey breaking up with her because he sees her dad being aggressive with a server because he didn’t get water fast enough. Grey’s family is so perfect and so loving — she doesn’t want to scare the shit out of him by revealing too fast that her family kind of has issues.

This is why she chooses to meet them at the diner that her dad and brothers like to eat at. She chooses the diner even though she basically cannot eat anything there except maybe a plate of eggs, because her dad already knows the staff there and he presumably likes them enough to keep coming back. She is pretty sure her dad will not torture the staff.

She tries to coach Grey into making a good impression, without revealing to him that her family dynamics are complicated and sometimes fraught with tension. Her efforts are completely pointless, because he has already figured out that her family dynamics are complicated and fraught with tension sometimes. Her anxiety actually ratchets up his own anxiety. When she tells him that she desperately wants her dad to like him but also, _fuck her dad_ because she doesn’t need her dad’s approval at all so her dad can just _deal with it_ — Grey is just bewildered. He tells her that she is making him so nervous, and when he is nervous, he’s a bit of a quiet spaz.

She gets all competitive about this — strangely — and tells him that he’s cute, but he doesn’t even know what it’s like to be a quiet spaz.

He kind of feels like she is minimizing his feelings, but he lets it go because he just wants this to go well, too. He understands that she is stressed out about this.

When he arrives to pick her up, he slowly grins at her, as she slowly swings open her door. He says, _“Hey.”_

And then she sees what he’s wearing, and she says, “You are going to wear _that_ to dinner?” She is affronted that he wore a graphic t-shirt with a dinosaur on it and a baby pink baseball cap — to meet her parents — like he is a little boy who doesn’t know that her dad is mildly homophobic and hates the color pink on men.

He looks down at his jeans and his t-shirt, as this dead weight drops in his stomach. He is hideous to her already, so that’s fucking great. He tells her, “It’s too late. We’re locked into this. I don’t have a change of clothes.” And she told him they were going to a diner? What the fuck is he supposed to wear to a diner? A suit and tie?

She is dressed in black jeans and an oversized cream cardigan. She is wearing lipstick. He pettily thinks that she’s a bit overdressed and his outfit is actually fly as fuck. It’s not exactly easy to come by Jurassic Park tees organically. He found this holey thing at a day market in the Summer Isles. It was a motherfucking coup.

“It’s fine,” she tells him grimly. “It has to be.”

“Wonderful,” he says, as he holds open the door for her.

 

 

  
She’s never actually brought a boy to meet her parents before. She’s only brought friends to meet her folks. She’s only vaguely told her folks she went on a _date,_ which was mostly a lie, just to get them off her back. Part of her expects this to be like it is in the movies. She kind of expects her dad to be alpha and interrogate him and to tell him that he better be good to her _or else._

In actuality, her parents just ask him a lot of questions. Her parents ask the both of them how they met. He tells her parents that they met in the last year, through Drogo and Dany. She has to correct him and remind him that they actually met two years ago — at Drogo and Dany’s wedding. He is like, “Oh! Did we chat?”

And she has to say, “We actually walked down the aisle together. Arm in arm. Because I was the maid of honor.” She tries to make a joke out of it and say, “Clearly, I made an impression,” but no one laughs. Because her words sound awkwardly bitter even though she is not. She just has terrible delivery sometimes.

“Sorry,” he says, shutting his plastic menu. “I was kind of all over the place that day. And jetlagged.”

 

 

  
After their food gets dropped off — she has a plate of bacon and eggs — her dad works hard to keep it light. Her dad jokingly asks Grey if he hangs out a lot in the back of squad cars.

It takes Grey a beat to understand. When he does, he sheepishly ducks his head a little bit. He says, “Um, not too _often.”_ He says, “Only _sometimes?”_

This makes her dad smile.

They ask him about his background. Her mom is especially curious. He tells them that he’s from the Summer Isles — his family is from Omburu, the big island. And here, when he talks about his family — he starts to relax a little bit — because he is very fond of them and he has told this story to people a lot.

Not to her though. She’s actually learning this for the first time right here.

He tells them he still has a lot of uncles and aunts back there. They didn’t make it out, or they didn’t try. So he goes back home a lot. He tells them he grew up spending his summers there. He smiles brilliantly, before he tells them that the water is insane — just transparent and expansive and warm. He tells them that he’s planning on making his way out there to see his brother sometime soon. They are going to live it up and just eat up all of the food, the fruit, and he’s going to get good at surfing again maybe. He slowly drags his hand over the vinyl top of their table, mimicking the brush of smooth white sand on the beach shore, and he abstractly tells them he might build a castle while he’s there.

Missandei listens to this, and she wants to drop out this guttural groan and say, oh my God, what the _fuck?_ Right into his face.

But her mom and her dad are here. And her mom wants to know if he has retained language. It obviously is a test of sorts. Her mom wants to know if he cares about tradition and culture and family. Her mom wants to see if he is a Westernized punk or a good boy from a good family.

He laughs easily tells her mom that he is fluent in the Summer Tongue but not a native speaker. He is a little bit slow in speaking because sometimes he has to translate everything in his head into the Common Tongue and then re-translate it out before speaking. He tells her mom that he speaks sort of conversational Low Valyrian, because there’s a pidgin dialect in the Isles because of the slave trade. But honestly, his Low Valyrian is just getting worse and worse because he rarely uses it.

Then her mom starts testing him — because she speaks Low Valyrian. She actually speaks it really, really well — it’s a language she grew up speaking, also because of the slave trade in Naath.

This is when it goes a little bit to shit. Grey loses his confidence a little bit when he has to communicate in a language he doesn’t excel in. He starts being more careful and deliberate in picking his words because he has to be. His dialect is a patois. He’s nervous that he sounds too casual or too uneducated or too indecipherable. He tries to strips out all of the Summer Tongue loan words in real time — on the spot. Missandei honestly thinks he’s doing really, really good job — especially in light of his nervousness — but then her mom just boldly asks him if he wants to have children. It makes Missy choke on her eggs and hack up speckles of it as she grasps onto the table. Grey is reaching over to slam his hand into her spine, to help coax it out.

In Low Valyrian, Missandei tells her that that’s a really personal question.

Her mom seriously tells the both of them that Missandei isn’t that young anymore.

Her face is _burning._

And so Grey chooses _this moment_ to awkwardly tell them that he doesn’t really believe in marriage. He says it slow and measured.

Her mom responds rapid-fire. Her mom pointedly tells him that neither do they. Naathi don’t really put a lot of emphasis on marriage, either. They just all had to get married when they immigrated to this country because that’s just what people do in this country, to get status and to get spousal benefits. In this country, if women are not married — they have _nothing_ and they are _nothing._ Her mom basically dares him to counter that, with just her eyes.

He says, “Uhhh,” as he tries to think quickly. And then he says that he agrees.

Her mom pointedly tells him that he and Missandei don’t need to be married to make babies.

This is when Grey glances over at Missandei questioningly. He is wondering whether or not her parents know about his penis thing. And the answer is obviously fucking _no._ Why in the world would she just randomly tell her parents about his genitalia?

They cannot yet read each other’s minds, so he doesn’t pick up more than her avoidant embarrassment.

Her mom asks him, if he doesn’t believe in marriage, then what does he believe in?

 _This_ is when her parents learn that he’s sort of an atheist. Because the idiot is prone to truthfulness. He tells her parents that he doesn’t believe in any of the gods. He thinks the gods are just stories that people came up once upon a time before they understood science. He tells them that his dad is a doctor and a scientist, so he grew up with his dad constantly telling him to use his brain, whenever he got a little too fanciful in his line of thinking. Like, the air that comes out of the leaves of trees isn’t so much miraculous and unexplainable as it is very explainable. It is photosynthesis. He tells them that he still goes through many of the ceremonies and the rites because it’s still important to his mother, and it’s part of retaining culture.

Missandei’s mom does not even give a fuck. In the Common Tongue, her mom says, “So you pretend to pray?”

He says, “Kind of? I don’t really look at it that way.”

And Missandei just stops herself from throwing her fist out and punching him for being so fucking _dumb._

 

 

  
She puts on this facade when they hug and kiss her parents goodbye. She titters out a laugh and tells them dinner was fun. She casually tells the both of them that they’ll all do dinner again soon — maybe family dinner at the house next time? Her mother casts her this glance — this kind of like, _“mmhmm”_ look. And Missandei just generally pretends she doesn’t see it.

And she is actually just _pissed_ at him, because her anger is a little misplaced right now. She tells herself that she is so pissed that he was so bad at reading the room. She is so pissed that he gave her parents many reasons to dislike him.

As a result, she gives him a bit of silent treatment as she tries and recovers from this. She crawls into his car, and she can’t believe their relationship is going this way — _already._

In the car, he asks her how she thinks it went and initially she says nothing. And then she says, “Well, it could’ve gone better.”

He says, “I thought it went okay.”

The drive back to her apartment is awkward and quiet. Her stereo is on and the music is soft. The most aggravating part of the drive is when the radio station goes to commercial and they have to silently listen to a chipper car wash advertisement in silence because they are saying nothing to each other.

She’s about to wish him a good night when he pulls up to her place. But instead, he says to her, “What did you want from me? How did you want me to be different? How could I have made that better?” And he is earnestly asking. He is not being aggressive or antagonistic. He is actually confused and a little bit hurt and regretful, that he has apparently messed up.

 

 

  
She sits him down on her couch with a mug of hot tea. He nervously watches her as she takes a seat on the other end of the sofa. Then she tiredly explains to him that her parents are not like his parents. She doesn’t have a cute and fun little rapport with her parents where they’re always cracking jokes and laughing over the painfully truthful things they say to each other. She tells him that her relationship with her parents has to be constantly managed. She has to show her best face to them always.

He asks, “Why?”

She says, “Because.”

She tells him that her parents are really judgmental. He tells her that his dad is actually really judgmental, too. She tells him that it’s different, that her parents are the kind of people who will disown her if she steps one foot out of line. He tells her that that sounds really hard and really shitty. He tells her that it must be really tiring always having to be “on” all the time. She tells him that it is.

So he asks her, “What if you just change it?”

She says, “What?”

He says, “What if you aren’t on your best behavior? What if you were just truthful? They’d disown you for that?”

“Maybe,” she says doubtfully.

He says, “My dad threatened to disown me when I didn’t go to medical school. He got over it.”

She flares a little bit here. She says, “My dad is not your dad.” She means that she doesn’t like how he purports to just know her already, based on some superficial facts.

He says, “I know.”

Because he has asked her to always be truthful with him, she says, “I feel like you are telling me how to live my life, like I haven’t already thought extensively about how I should live my life. I feel like you’re telling me I don’t try hard enough.”

“I know you try very hard, Missandei,” he says quietly. “Why are we fighting about this? Does the way your parents feel about me affect how _you_ feel about me?”

She’s about to exclaim out something like, _what?_ She’s about to ask him what he’s talking about, because she has made it clear that she doesn’t care what her parents think. And she honestly didn’t anticipate that these would be the kind of things they’d be talking about so much already — that these would be the things that they’d have to negotiate with each other right at the start of their relationship. She thought they’d just do more hanging out and movie-watching. She thought that right about now, he’d be doing stuff like kissing her nicely and cutely when he drops her off at her door.

And then she says, “Oh crap,” as she touches her stomach. She winces.

 

 

  
So, she tries to get him to leave her the hell alone — at least until their next date night — so that she can go in peace. She doesn't think she got glutened, but she thinks she might have gotten dairied. There might have been some butter in those eggs. She _did_ think they tasted _too good._

“I think you should go,” she tells him, as she starts pressing against his leg with the bottoms of her feet.

“I don’t —”

_“Please.”_

He says, “Missandei —” as he lets her push him, as he gently falls off of the couch. He grasps onto the coffee table and pulls himself back up into sitting position. He has guessed what is going on even though she hasn’t explicitly said it. She is holding onto her stomach and she is squirming in place. He says, “It’s okay. This isn’t a big deal. Everyone poops. This doesn’t bother me.”

“It bothers _me,”_ she says.

“Don’t be embarrassed.”

“Oh my _God.”_

“Like, we’re going to poop in front of each other anyway — at some point, right?” he says.

 _“What!”_ she shouts. “Why did you just say that like it’s a given! Is it _normal_ for couples to _poop_ in front of each other?”

He kind of laughs — and then he sees that she doesn’t think it’s funny — so he full-on stops laughing. Then, he carefully says, “Trust me, if there’s anyone who’s not at all judgmental about body stuff — it’s me. You’re good, Missandei. Just go poop! I’ll just hang out out here by myself for a bit.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t want you to hang out there while I poo. It might take a while.”

“I can wait. We’re in the middle of talking,” he says. “It’s still early enough. I’m not sleepy.”

“Grey! Can you please just _leave!”_ she says helplessly, sounding like she’s begging now, as she bounces in place and just squeezes her ass muscles together as tightly as she can.

_“Why?”_

“Because I like you _so much!”_ she blurts, whining about it a little bit. “I like you _so much,_ Grey, and I just don’t want you to hear me _poop.”_ She whimpers. “I don’t want you to hear me poop and then just start associating the sound of me pooping with the image you have of me in your head!”

He looks stunned. He says, “Oh.”

“Oh my God,” she says miserably.

And — he actually finds the declaration really cute and sweet. He finds her pouty, grimacing face really cute. He loves the way her little hands are buried in the hem of her sweater. The whole look of it actually just makes him melt inside.

He says, “Aw, Miss —” as he crawls over to her, getting to his knees. He smiles at her as he grabs onto her tortured face — just like the time in her car. He softly says, “I _really_ like you, too,” as he leans forward and tries to press a kiss into her lips.

She holds her hand up to block him. She palms his entire face and pries it away from her lips before he can make contact. She feels his lashes flutter against her fingers. She feels the surprise exhale of his warm breath and his mouth on her palm. She muffles his words as he says, _“What the —”_

She exclaims, “Don’t kiss me _right now!_ Not when I have to poop! This is _not_ going to be our first real kiss!”

“Babe,” he says, giving it one last gentle protest, pulling his face away from her hand, frowning. He’s wiping his mouth because she smeared his spit across his face.

She says, _“Please,_ Grey.”  
  
He sighs. He stands up. He says, “Okay, I’ll go,” as he picks up his jacket from the back of her armchair. “I’ll just see you later, then. Have a nice, easy shit, okay?”

“Okay, thank you!”

 

 

  
He’s reversing out of his parking spot when his phone vibrates. He pauses to read the message really quick because he’s pretty sure that only one person would be texting him right now.

He is correct. It is her.

She is telling him: _It hurts._

He shakes his head. He really likes how she is okay with texting him from the toilet as she’s going, but she is not okay with him just being in the same area as she is when she's going. Baby steps, then.

He texts back: _I’m sorry it hurts._

 

 

 

 


	30. Grey does not defend Missy's honor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy is still wondering why the future love of her life isn't sexually assaulting her yet. The future love of her life likes to creep on the genitals of dogs in between his heart-melting moments.

 

 

 

They both start to relax a little bit in the third week of dating. They start incorporating banter back into their interactions. He becomes more talkative again, offering a consistent flow of observations and minor personal revelations each time they see each other. She finds herself laughing a lot more at the things he says — though she’s still in the habit of being overly careful about the things that she says back to him. She finds that dating is kind of aimless and indefinite — much like friendship is. It completely makes sense when she takes time to assess it, but another thing she’s been realizing is how much she’s been socialized and conditioned to believe certain things about being with someone else. She thought dating him would feel like crossing a threshold, that she’d feel a sense of accomplishment and would be able to rest on her laurels and coast. Dating actually feels like a work in progress — just like anything else.

By the third week of dating, they have gone on about six official dates — she keeps a closer count than he does because she has been avidly compiling information, on how long many other women go for, before sex.

Both Yara and Dany have terrible insight on this kind of thing. They both tell her they had sex on the first date with their current significant others. They both expect her to kind of react prudishly to this, but sometimes they don’t give her enough credit. Missandei just stares back at them blankly. She is not surprised by their revelations at all.

Both Yara and Dany kind of lecture her and tell her that trying to calendar in sex or just the idea of ‘making him wait’ is a really archaic, anti-feminist notion because it upholds these bullshit ideas about purity and how women have to guard their virtue because that is their main value. Both Yara and Dany automatically just start making assumptions about Missy’s issues with sex — and while they are right on about eighty percent of it — the twenty percent that they are wrong in almost renders all of their insights useless.

Like, Yara tries to be helpful by talking to Missy _like she is an idiot,_ saying, “You actually don’t have to dive deep into sex right off the bat. Like, just focus on foreplay. Just relax and let him touch your boobs once in a while.”

At the moment, the issue is actually that he doesn’t really seem like he wants to touch her boobs at all. She’s currently a little too embarrassed to admit this out loud to them — or talk to him about it even though she knows _she must_ — because voicing it out loud is going to feel like she is pulling her head out of the sand. It is going to be like admitting that she knows there is some deficiency in her — that she is not sexy or she is not inspiring or simply that there is something _deep and visceral_ lacking in her, because he is not going mad with passion. He already knows what she looks like naked, and he is still completely able to completely control himself when he is around her.

This constant observation that her head spins around makes her realizes how much she has been led to believe that what all men want is sex. It makes her realize how strongly she’s been messaged that men only know how to take from women. It makes her realize that she has operated under this fear that there is a monster that lives inside all men, that makes even good men become utterly terrible.

The other shameful thing that she keeps private is that he keeps kissing her on the cheek or on the corner of her mouth when he says goodbye to her. To be fair to him, she has been making absolutely no moves on him, either. But she honestly thought he’d be driving this thing because . . . he is the expert.

But again — she keeps learning that she has absorbed _so many_ assumptions. She thought she’d be pursued. She thought she’d have to fight him off. She thought he’d take the reins. She thought her job was to set the pace, as she figures out how vulnerable she wants to be with him.

She’s afraid that admitting out loud, her impression of him — that he has been physically holding himself at distance from her — actually means that this just isn’t working, that this relationship just does not work for him. She’s afraid that, any day now, he’s going to tell her that he thinks they should stop seeing each other. And she will probably start crying in front of him when he tells her this, because she doesn’t feel like she’s gotten enough time with him yet.

This is part of the reason she’s been trying to be on her best behavior for him. She’s been tamping down on her anxiety and her insecurities. She’s been trying to convince him that she’s kind of fun — sometimes — through her actions. She has been readily agreeing with his suggestions, when they talk about what new thing they want to try to do together. She’s been trying to stay her execution.

“Hey,” he says to her, reaching out to lightly smack her arm with the back of his hand. “Look at that little guy,” he says, pointing to little blond labrador puppy that is tucked underneath a bench. The dog’s owner is having lunch with her friend, with her dog’s leash wrapped around her leg.

They are at a cafe for a bite before they go and check out the arboretum — a place neither of them have been to, despite having resided in King’s Landing for the majority of their lives.

“Little man is _so cute,_ oh my God,” Grey says. Since dating him, she has learned that he is really into dogs. He constantly looks at dogs and covets them when they are out and about.

“He is,” she says mildly, as they inch forward in line. “He’s really cute.”

“Actually, he’s a she,” Grey corrects. “I just got a look.”

This makes her smile to herself — she’s facing away from him. She asks, “You looked on purpose?”

“Well, yeah,” he says. “I always look. I look for balls and if I see them, I’m like, ‘Oh God, why didn’t you neuter your dog?’ I always look for a penis because I want to use the right pronoun for the dog.” He pauses. “Is that weird?” And then after another really short pause, he rhetorically asks himself, “Do I do _this_ because of what happened to me?”

She is less obsessed with dogs. So she really can’t speak with any expertise on this. She does know that she’s not really looking for dog penises in every dog she meets. She still offers an opinion. She cannot think of a cute, witty, funny joke fast enough because she’s a freaking dork, so she says, “Maybe!” like the bland stupid bitch that she is sometimes.

He seems unfazed by her blandness. He just says, “Little girl reminds me a little of Mondo. Mondo was one of our dogs in the Summer Isles. I was so young when we left again, but I remember being just so devastated, when we had to leave all of our dogs behind — because they didn’t understand that we were leaving them forever. They ran after us. I like, sometimes still have nightmares where I hear them crying for me. Like, it still guts me so hard when I think about how lonely and sad and scared they were when we left them behind. Anyway — sometimes I think about getting my dad a dog — so he’d have _something_ to fixate on, now that he’s retired. I think if I got my dad a dog, he’ll either freak out and kill it, or he’ll be really into it. Just two modes with that guy.”

In the course of dating him, she has learned that he has a tendency to drop really tragic stories like they are nothing — like they mean nothing. And obviously they mean something to him — but Missandei is always struck by people who don’t hide emotional pain. She has commented on it once or twice — to him — he just plainly said one word to her. He said, “Therapy,” before quickly moving on.

It actually makes her think about how he’s also so much better at therapy than she is, because she still can’t do what he so effortlessly does.  
  
“Miss, look alive,” he cuts in, lightly nudging her back. “There’s a gap, babe. Close the gap.”

He means there’s a gap between her and the next person in line. She knows that he is paranoid someone will cut in front of them and he will have to wait just a tiny bit longer for his sandwich — or he will have to confront the person who took their spot. He also likes to be orderly.

 

 

  
He has to go use the toilet right when they arrive at restaurant. He leaves her to talk to the woman at the host stand about their reservation as he gently nudges his way through the throng of people loitering in the entryway.

Their table is not ready for another fifteen minutes because they are a little bit early. To get away from the crowd, she meekly swims her way to the bar, dodging servers, tables, and diners on her way there.

There, she gets hit on. Almost right away. She hasn’t even taken off her jacket when a man slides in next to her, flips around so his elbows are on the bar top, and says, “Hi there. You’re beautiful.”

She immediately avoids eye contact — it’s just instinct. It’s just what she does with this kind of attention. She has seen Dany lean into it, playing nice for all of three seconds before she rips men new assholes for daring to talk to her when she is out in public.

This man tries to engage her in conversation. He asks her for her name. She resistantly tells him what it is — and she mentally reams herself for just blurting out the stupid truth because she’s such a pansy when she is just so uncomfortable.

He either doesn’t read her body language or her subtle cues — or he doesn’t want to read them — because he still smiles at her, and he tells her that it’s a really pretty name.

When she sees Grey making his way back to her — from across the room — she feels relief. She starts biding time. She starts applying her entire focus toward getting the bartender to notice her, so that she has someone new to talk to. She just generally pretends that everything is normal — as she ignores the guy standing next to her.

When Grey finally gets to her, he leans forward to read the beer list. To her, he still quietly says, “What are we drinking?” He is generally unaware she feels like she’s drowning a little bit — that she needs to be saved a little bit.

“Not sure, bro," she says to him. "Whatever you want.”

“Bro?” the guy next to her repeats — loud enough for them to hear. He was eavesdropping, clearly. He is grinning at the both of them. He is saying, “Ouch. Friend-zoned.”

This is when Grey notices the guy for the first time ever. This is also when he notices that Missandei is completely avoiding eye contact with _every human being_ in the room.

He quickly figures out what is happening — because it’s not deep and it’s not complex. He figures out that he is being sized up. He figures out that she was given attention because she looks like a beautiful woman alone at a bar. He figures out she feels a particular way about it. He figures out that it’s on him to respond to this.

And it feels like old hat. It feels a little bit like deja vu. Because he remembers dealing with this _a lot_ when he was with Alayaya — contending constantly with other men’s impression of his apparent unworthiness.

He’s a lot older now. He really doesn’t want to have another screaming match with his girlfriend in public, as she drunkenly calls him a coward for not claiming her.

Instead, he points his chin at the glass that the other guy is holding. He says, “What you drinking, man?”

The other guy looks mildly surprised — he’s caught off guard. He says, “Oh, the IPA.”

“Oh, I was thinking about trying that. Is it good?”

“Do you — want a sip?” the other guy says, already holding his glass out to Grey. “Do you wanna try before you buy?”

Missandei seriously just stands there, awkwardly in between them as the glass of beer gets passed from the guy’s hand to Grey’s hand. She mutely watches as Grey takes a small sip, tasting it before saying that it’s pretty good. He observes that it’s kind of aggressively hoppy. The other guy readily agrees — says that it kind of tastes like a double IPA.

And then they _seriously_ have a five-minute conversation about beer, right in front of her. Grey starts talking about how he’s brewing beer with his dad, mostly IPAs actually, though they are experimenting with lagers because it’s been pretty hot and lagers are just refreshing as fuck.

The other guy is _seriously_ like, “Yes! You can drink so many lagers, back to back without feeling full. It’s like, a good cookout beer!”

When a server comes over to tell them that their table is ready, the other guy _actually_ looks disappointed. He actually looks like he wants to ask Grey for his number — but he refrains. He just holds up his drink to them and says, “Well, it was really fun talking to you, man. Hope you guys have a good dinner!”

 

 

  
When she pulls up to his house, she sees his dad following him out of the garage with beer growlers tucked under his arms. Grey drops them off in the pile in the middle of the driveway, then he stands up, looks at her through the windshield, and spins his forefinger around in wide circles. He is telling her to flip around and back the butt of her car in the driveway.

After she does that, she pops her trunk and hops out of her SUV. She says, “Wow! That’s so much beer!” as his dad just continues talking at him.

His dad is telling him that he better take careful notes. His dad is telling him that he better not get wasted with his dumbass friends and just go fuck it all. His dad is telling him to remember to collect all of the growlers and bring them back because growlers aren’t free. His dad is telling him to let her take him home if he gets too drunk because it’s not safe to drink and drive. His dad is in middle of telling him that, on the off-chance that they both get stupid-drunk — _do not try and drive home_ — and that is when Grey loses it.

He says, “Dad! Get the fuck. Off my _balls!”_

His dad is like, “Fucking _relax!_ Sorry I give a shit about you and love you and don’t want you to _die.”_

He says, “You’re talking to me like I’m goddamn _moron!”_

His dad decides to retort, “Well, if the glove fits — you must acquit.”

And Grey is like, “What the _fuck_ does that even _mean!_ The glove didn’t fit. That’s why he was acquitted! What the _fuck,_ Dad!”

“Jesus Christ, son. This is how your want your girl to see you? You really want your girl to see you losing your shit in the driveway because I told you not to drive _drunk?”_

This is kind of when he remembers that she’s there. This is when he quietly walks over to her — where she is patiently standing next to her car — and at this point, she’s so used to hearing his dad yell at him that it doesn’t faze her anymore — so she smiles hello at him. She giggles a little bit at how he’s struggling to come down from level-ten-pissed — his hands are little hard and rough on her body as he grabs her by the hips and pulls her in for a quick hug. She feels him press his mouth into the side of her head as she goes a little breathless — as her giggling drops a little into chuckling. He says, “Hey,” as she grabs ahold of him, her hands twisting in the bottom of his shirt as he briefly presses a little bit harder into her.

And then he lets go, and she is left going _what the fuck._

As he goes back to loading alcohol into her car, his dad snitches. His dad tells her that Grey made something for her. And before she can guess what it is — a paper heart cutout filled with candy, a handwritten love note explaining all of his fucking feelings so that she can finally stop driving herself crazy guessing — his dad says, “It’s kombucha. He wanted you to be able to drink some sort of homemade hooch along with everyone else and he didn’t have time to attempt cider, so he made you a probiotic beverage. It’ll be good for your bowel movements.”

“No, it won’t,” Grey says, interrupting. He is holding up two store-bought glass bottles. Gin. And vodka.

She bursts out into a smile — in spite of herself. She presses her hands to her mouth — because she already wants to barf! Behind her hands, she says, “Oh my God, that’s so sweet!”

 

 

  
In the car, she asks him if her outfit is okay. He’s driving her car because he knows the directions. He barely glances at her before he says, “You look great.”

And then she just unleashes some of her paranoid rambling on him. She tells him she’s very nervous and her bowel movements have actually been a little dicey because her tummy has been _so nervous._ She reminds him that the last time she hung around his friends, she made a really _terrible_ impression. Like, they probably hate her because she was such an a-hole to them.

He cuts in here. He interjects, and he reminds her that her brother got shot that night. So people generally gave her and her crap personality a break for that. He says this in a joking tone — to lighten the mood — but she valiantly resists. She continues telling him that all of his friends are so _cool_ and so _funny_ and so _athletic_ — and she’s not very athletically inclined at all. She’s just a weak-bodied nerd who listens to music like a white sorority girl.

Grey listens to her self-effacing concerns — and they are obviously all batshit concerns — but he refrains from comforting her. He is very familiar with anxiety. He doesn’t think blind assurances do much for anxiety — besides make it worse because when people say that all these terrible fears that come from deep inside are wrong because these fears are all irrational and unfounded — it is denying what someone experiences as real. The denial of feelings is damaging. And he was also raised by his father and his mother, so he says, “So you have shit eye-hand coordination and your jokes sometimes make people feel despair inside. So you really like dance music. So what, man? What’s the worst that can happen?”

She actually considers this for a second. Then she says, “Maybe I get so anxious and nervous I end up shitting myself in front of everyone?”

This actually makes him laugh-cough loudly — he completely doesn’t mean to. He drops his face momentarily and stares at the steering wheel as he rides out the laughter. She’s about to tell him to please keep his eyes on the road right when he lifts them. He clears his throat then.

And then in a kinda-strangled voice, he says, “Okay, yes. I guess shitting yourself in front of all my friends is a possibility. But what’s the best thing that can happen to you today?”

She really wants to say that today, maybe at the end of it, maybe she can finally get a fucking cuddle and get all squished up underneath a bunch of fluffy pillows and blankets with him — after he showers himself fresh.

But she does not dare say this out loud because it is _insane._

Instead, she says, “The best thing that can happen is that everyone likes me. And then I have new friends.”

He also laughs at that — but softer now. More wistfully now. He says, “Fuck.” Then he mutters, “You break my heart so hard sometimes.”

When they finally arrive at his friend’s house — he looks at her. He gives her his full focus. He asks her if she’s ready for this shit. She nods eagerly — feeling a little scrutinized underneath his stare. Then she tells him she’s so ready for this shit.

He says, “Good. You’ve got this.” He holds out his hand for her to squeeze real quick.

 

 

 

 


	31. Missy consumes gluten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy goes to a cookout! She hangs out with friends of the future love of her life as the future love of her life kind of gets crazy plastered because he's so excited about his beer. Then, Missy makes a play for affection — while the future love of her life is kind of unconscious. Tsk tsk, Missy.

 

 

 

She follows Grey mutely, carrying two growlers of beer as he scarily balances five growlers in his arms and hands. She follows him through an unfamiliar house, just nervous about accidentally tripping on something, face-planting, then smashing bottles all over the floors and walls. His friends will definitely think she’s a freak then.

It’s a warm day. Everyone is congregated on the deck in the back. She hears the drone of laughter and voices — and it makes her _so nervous_ and unworthy already. Grey’s body is blocking her view at the sliding glass door. When the crowd spots his arrival they immediately erupts into yelling and hollering and whooping. She hears someone shout out, “Nudho! You’re a motherfucking hero!”

There’s a really chaotic flurry of activity, as a bunch of his friends swarm him, to touch him in greeting, to tickle him — which makes his body twist as he yells at them not to tickle him because he’s holding the beer — before his friends try to take some of the load off him — as Grey actually fights with them a little bit and says that the beer is labeled with sticky notes — don’t remove the sticky notes. He only lets go of the beer when he is assured that they won’t pull off the sticky notes.

His friends get super demure and super polite when they see that she’s behind Grey. Balaq quickly grabs the growlers in her arms from her — with a solemn bow. Tal jumps up when he sees her. This is his house. He quickly procures a chair for her sit down in. He quickly becomes overly hospitable, asking her if she needs a drink or some food or a jacket or a blanket or something. It is not cold at all, so she shyly shakes her head and tells him no thank you.

Grey is at the table with some of his buddies, arranging the bottles in general order of lightest to darkest, distractedly answering some of their questions as a few of the guys go out to her car and bring in more bottles.

Grey is putting down comment cards and pens — to the groans, jeers, and boos of his friends. They tell him that really don’t want to do homework before they drink. He’s telling them to just do it. Just do it because he and his dad worked real hard on this shit, and they want the data.

She feels her chair rattle — she actually squeaks and instinctively holds onto the seat as she looks over her shoulder.

Behind her, Drogo is leaning far forward, toward her. He is trying to instigate a hug with her. He is grinning widely.

She is so _relieved_ to see a familiar face. With the enthusiasm of probably a million dying suns, she says, “Oh my gosh, Drogo! _Hi!”_ as she twists her body and reaches for him with her arms.

 

 

  
Grey kind of ignores her a little bit — not completely — but just a touch. Introductions aren’t really made. Food is just thrusted on her right away, and she has to awkwardly tell Tal, by herself, that she can’t eat gluten or dairy — at which point Tal tells her that he already knows. Grey told him. Tal starts pointing to random food items in foil trays. He points to a tray of what looks like chicken in brown sauce. He says, “That’s gluten-free.” He points to a tray of corn ears. He says, “That’s gluten-free.” He points to a tray of mixed rice. He says, “That’s gluten-free.” He points to an ambiguous yellow mash. He tells her, “That’s gluten-free.” He points to an ambiguous glass jug of white-colored liquid. He says, “That’s gluten free.” He points to a tray of black beans. He says, “That’s gluten-free.” He points to a tray of lettuce and tomatoes. He says, “That’s gluten-free.” He basically has pointed to everything on the table, before he remembers to point to the grill, which Xhondo is manning. Tal points to the meats and he says, “That’s gluten-free.”

Her face flushes hot. She sheepishly feels really touched — and also still really scared and awkward. She hesitates, thinking about whether she wants to risk getting sick so that she doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings — it would not be the first time — but she ends up shifting on her feet and carefully asking him if he used any soy sauce or packaged marinades in any of the stuff.

She expects Tal to take offense, but instead, he says, “Oh!” and then goes over all of the food again, and he _seriously_ starts listing out all of the ingredients to her. It’s through this long and arduous process that he is being really cool about — that she realizes that he has a really impressive food vocabulary. Like, he knows stuff about food.

Then she realizes that he’s a professional. Like, it’s his job. She figures this out because he tells her that there actually _is_ soy sauce in the marinade, but it’s something he pilfered from the food lab at work. He said he and his coworkers made the soy sauce via centrifuge — so he’s sure there’s no gluten in it. The soy sauce is from one of their experimental batches. He tells her it has a weird opacity, so they couldn’t cook with it and serve it to customers, but no big deal to serve it to friends.

She ends up stuttering out, “You’re a — a chef!” She feels so embarrassed that she never even asked him about himself before she started interrogating him about his food.

“Nah,” he says, easily — really friendly. “I’m a cook. Chef is like —” He makes a gesture. Like implying elevation and prestige. He says, “Chef is chef. I just cook.”

“You went to culinary school?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Straight outta high school. College just wasn’t for me, you know?”

She starts to feel a little bit terrible inside — because she always feels inexplicably bad inside when people are so nice to her and she doesn’t completely understand what she has done to deserve it. Everyone is _so nice._ Everyone is scrutinizing and watching her — but not in a shitty way like they are figuring out if she’s good enough for Grey or not. They are actually waiting with bated breath for her to eat the food and to give a verdict on it. They are all really excited for her to try food from the Summer Isles.

She nervously and obediently starts shoving food into her face, because she really wants them to like her — really badly. Her mouth is full of yellow mash — which, she now knows, are plantains — as she tells them that she’s had a few Summer Isles dishes. At Grey’s mom and dad’s house.

Tal says, “Oh yeah. His parents are pretty good cooks.”

After she stuffs a chicken hunk into her mouth, she says, “Oh my _God,_ this is _so good.”_ She is kind of stunned because a lot of times, gluten-free food is just okay — like, a lesser version or substitute of a “real” dish.

She tries the kombucha. There are two big bottles. One is for everyone else. And one is just for her so that she doesn’t have to share. That’s what Grey tells her when he drops it at her feet before walking off to refill his own plate.

It tastes like kombucha. It is pleasantly sour and fizzy and a little sweet. Even as indistinct as it is, it’s still well made and she still just wants to start bawling over all of this like a freaking crazy basketcase. Everyone is just _so nice._ He is just _so nice._

 

 

  
Drogo tells her that Dany isn’t at the party because it’s not her thing. Dany hates being anywhere for more than two hours. She doesn’t like aimless nostalgia. She doesn’t like sitting around, shooting the shit. Drogo says, “Well, you already know — you’re her best buddy.”

Missandei nods at this. It is true. She is Dany’s best buddy — and Dany is definitely like, really scheduled and highly productive and easily bored.

There’s a cup of kombucha mixed with a little bit of vodka in her lap, squished in between her knees. She is being super duper careful not to go overboard. She really does not want to get drunk and start losing her mind again. Her body is getting warmer and warmer, as she loosens up more and more and lets go of some of her anxiety.

She lets herself look at Alayaya for instance. Alayaya has been crazy nice to her today, which has made Missandei feel like a real dud because she was such a petty dick to Alayaya when they first met. There’s just a bunch of stuff she still doesn’t know about this person. She doesn't know if Alayaya was the one that got away. She doesn’t know if they were in love. She doesn’t know how long they were in love. She doesn’t know if he had his heart broken or he was the one who was the heartbreaker.

She just knows that the two of them look kind of beautiful together and they have so much in common because they have a lot of inside jokes — like sexually charged inside jokes.

She is pretty sure that, love or not, Grey and Alayaya have _definitely_ had sex together, because when Missandei comes out of the bathroom — not from going, just from washing her hands — Alayaya is chatting with him in the kitchen. Alayaya and Grey are kind of arguing with each other. She is saying to him, “Well, as someone who’s had a lot of sex with you, I still don’t get the appeal of sour beers. They are too _sour.”_

They don’t notice her accidental eavesdropping because the bathroom is upstairs, and she is hidden by a wall on the staircase. Missy hears Grey say, “Man, as someone who’s had a lot of sex with you, you sound like one of those motherfuckers from ten years ago who were all like, ‘Gross, this IPA is too bitter!’”

Alayaya says, “Hey, that’s great that you bring that up, because as someone who’s had a lot of sex with you, I really think people went way overboard with hoppiness back when IPAs were becoming a thing. It’s the same thing now with sours — where people are just trying to get this stuff as sour as humanly possible.”

He says, “As someone who’s had a lot of sex with you — um, I actually agree with that.”

 

 

  
He is pretty drunk by the end of the night — because he got so excited and he was so happy drinking all of the beer that he made. He messily gathers up the damp, beer-stained comment cards and shoves them into the back pocket of his jeans as he sways on his feet. He grasps onto the table — to retain his bearings. He hears laughter behind him — before he feels a warm palm crawl up his spine before squeezing his neck hard.

“You gonna be alright, man?” Drogo asks. “Missy taking you home?”

He says, “Yeah,” as he exhales, as he blinks. He says, “I’m really fucked up right now.”

“Yeah, man,” Drogo says, laughing. “You literally drank three cups of _everything._ That’s like . . . so much beer!”

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters, breathing heavily now. “I need to pee again.”

“Oh, then let’s go pee,” Drogo says, grabbing onto Grey’s shoulders with both hands now, pivoting him around and pointing him at the sliding glass door.

 

 

  
Missandei does a double-take when Drogo walks out of the bathroom with Grey. Drogo is actually holding Grey up. His hands are still wet, smearing watery handprints on Grey’s t-shirt as he carefully drags Grey down the stairs. The rest of them are all standing around in the kitchen, trying to quickly wash the growlers so that her trunk doesn’t stink with beer, and also so Grey doesn’t get chewed out by his dad for bringing back a bunch of sticky, messy bottles.

Kojja laughs when she spots Grey and Drogo. She says, “He’s so fucking wasted!” She is also pretty drunk.

Behind her, Xhondo lets out a low whistle. He’s shaking his head. He’s saying, “Some people just don’t know their limit, man.”

To Missy, Drogo says, “Okay, I’m going to put him in your car real quick. And then I’ll come back here and help you load everything, cool?”

She says, “Um, yeah. Cool.”

 

 

  
After she hugs everyone goodbye — after everyone tells her to definitely come through with the next get-together — it’s gonna be at Xhondo’s! — she starts getting weirdly emotional again. But everyone’s been drinking, so no one really notices.

When Alayaya hugs Missandei goodbye — Missandei awkwardly and loosely brings her arms up to briefly press against Alayaya’s back. She glumly thinks that this woman just smells fucking amazing and is really soft and has really smooth, clear, beautiful skin — on top of being really classy, a great dresser, and just really super nice.

Missandei gets a serious armful of food — an armful of leftovers that Tal carefully wrapped up in foil for her even though she bashfully tells him that it’s okay, she doesn’t want to take all of his food. He says, “Nah,” before he tells her he made the food for her, so she’s got to take it.

Drogo is just a champ. She basically has to do nothing at all. When she walks outside, all of the bottles have caps and are arranged neatly in cardboard boxes that he has somehow magically procured. She mutely drops off her trays of food next to the bottles before Drogo reaches up and shuts her trunk for her.

They pause right before they hug goodbye. Drogo stares at her in Tal’s dimly light driveway, and he asks her if she’s okay to drive. She tells him that she's totally okay to drive. Drogo, who is planning on staying a little bit longer to sober up before he heads home, tells her to call him if there are any issues at all. And then he tells her that she’s got her hands full with that one. He points to Grey, who is kind of half-dozing in the passenger seat.

And then he pensively asks, “How are things going? With you guys?” He asks as if he is going against his better judgement. He asks as if he immediately wants to say nevermind. She doesn’t know the intricacies of their fight. She only knows that Drogo is sometimes intrusive like how Dany is sometimes intrusive. She assumes that this is what Drogo is trying to be careful about.

She tries to reassure him. She says, “You’re a really good friend to him. And I know he loves you.”

Drogo says, “Oh, I know he loves me, too,” like it is obvious and like this is something he never questions. It makes her blink and marvel over confident people — again. Then he sighs. Then he tells her, “Just take care of each other and try to make each other happy, okay?”

She slowly says, “Okay,” even as she thinks _what the fuck?_ That is just a damning thing to say to her. She slowly gets on her tiptoes as she accepts a big bear hug from him.

As she’s getting into the driver’s side, he spontaneously laughs next to her open door. She pauses, looking at him questioningly.

Drogo explains, “Watch out for his father when you get in, okay? His dad can freak out a little bit when he sees his beautiful baby boy all fucked up like this. I think it’s because there’s still a part of him that worries that Grey will become a drunk, get into hard drugs, get a teenage girl pregnant, and ruin his entire life by _not going to medical school.”_

 

 

  
He’s kind of awake, in the sense that he makes noise and can give her completely nonsensical responses when she asks him how he’s doing. His eyes are mostly closed — and he smells a little ripe. The drunker he got, the more beer he accidentally spilled on himself, and also the more beer other people accidentally spilled on him.

It is kind of skeevy, but she feels more emboldened to touch him liberally because he is so unconscious. She touches his cute face, cups his cheek, feels his stubble under her palm. She feels the rumble of his groan underneath the wall of his warm chest, as she pulls out of Tal’s driveway and the car twists. She holds Grey’s relaxed, loose hand in hers as she heads to the main street. She feels his calluses and some scar tissue from boxing.

She needs his help when she gets to his house — because she wants to get him into bed without waking his parents up. He’s too heavy for her weakass body to carry.

She shakes him awake and she asks him to walk. He groans again. And — like a zombie — he tugs at the handle on his door with his eyes closed. It opens — and then he starts falling out.

She rushes around the car to catch him — his seatbelt is still holding him up. She hooks an arm over her shoulder and then takes the liberty of pressing her lips to his cheek — she kisses him because this shit is actually really fucking adorable. She wonders if her mom ever thought that her dad was really fucking adorable, all of the times her mom had to drag her dad’s drunken body out of some party.

They stumble clumsily to the front door. He is putting at least half of his entire weight on her. She is swaying messily because she’s so left-heavy. She pushes him against the side of his parents’ house, as she asks him where his keys are, as she starts groping around his front pockets for them. She hears him exhale — as he fights something inside of himself — as he musters up some coherency. He reaches into his jacket and — again — just about falls over.

She lunges for his waist. She holds him up by pressing her body into his, sandwiching him against the wall as she digs into his hoodie for his keys.

In the middle of this, he has the wherewithal to be like, “Shit, this is hot.”

It makes her laugh. It also makes her flush. It makes her body tingle. It makes her hyper-aware of all the parts that are pressed against him. It makes her sweat a little bit. She tells him, “Be good. I’m trying to get you to bed.”

He laughs, too. Quietly. He whispers, “Okay.”

When he’s in his house — it’s easier. He knows his house like the back of his hand, so he stumbles his way through it, making a little bit of noise, but nothing disastrous happens. He ends up crawling in the dark to his bed on his hands and knees, because he needs to keep his center of gravity low to the ground or else he’ll fall over. She follows him and watches him crawl. She is beaming at him in the dark because he’s just the fucking cutest. From the door of his bedroom, she whispers that it looks like he’s done this once or twice before — come home just totally wasted and just climbed into bed.

Lying on his back, he agrees with her, that yes, he’s done this once or twice before. And then he says, “Fuck.” He says, “Fuck me. I need to pee again.”

She straightens. She says, “Oh! Do you need help?”

He’s easing himself up. He’s shakily getting back to his feet. He says, “No, babe. I can probably manage by myself.”

She takes the opportunity to go grab the food out of her car and stuff it in his parents’ fridge so it doesn’t sit in the warm summer night for God knows how much longer. She is frantically rearranging stuff in his parents’ overstuffed refrigerator when she hears a wall-rattling thump originating from the guest bathroom.

She shuts the fridge closed after just cramming the rest of the food in there. She quietly runs back to the bathroom to check on him. She also holds her breath and just basically waits for his dad to start shouting out his name.

It doesn’t happen. She quietly knocks on the bathroom and whispers to him. She asks him if he’s okay.

Then, the toilet flushes. Then, he opens the door and starts stumbling back to his bedroom. He didn’t wash his hands, but it’s cool — he’s too drunk.

He collapses back down on his bed. He sighs in relief. He covers his face with his arm when she puts herself inside his room, shuts the door, and flicks on the light. He says, “Miss. The fucking _lights.”_

With the lights on, she sees that he’s a real mess. His shoes are still on — and he’s got them on his bed. His shirt is a blotchy damp mess from beer, water, maybe urine — who even knows at this point. And his jeans are unbelted, unzipped, and unbuttoned.

“Can I help you get comfortable?” she asks.

“What does that even _mean?”_ he mutters. “Shut off the lights!”

“Please don’t yell at me,” she says — even as she reaches out and flicks off his light.

“Sorry, babe,” he says. And he really _does_ sound contrite. “My dad has just fucked me up, with how I talk to women.”

“I think you talk to women just fine,” she says, as she reaches down and starts peeling his shirt off. The wetness is water. Not urine. “You and Alayaya are still really close, huh?”

Okay, what the _fuck?_ Why is she even _going here_ right now?

“Huh?” he says, as he raises his arms up, so that she can pull his shirt off. “Yeah, we are. Though _still_ is pushing it. We haven’t been friends consistently. We are getting back to how we were.”

“Like when you guys were together,” she supplies.

 _“No,_ Miss,” he says sleepily, with his eyes shut tightly and his face in a grimace. The room is spinning for him. He says, “I’m with _you_ now.”

“I’m a little jealous,” she admits.

“Yeah, I can tell.”

 

 

  
She seriously takes off his clothes and shoes for him — she leaves his underwear on because taking that off while he’s so drunk feels super assault-y — and then she seriously just blatantly steals cuddles from him in this imperfect state. He doesn’t smell very clean and his bed is very small and he’s getting damp and clammy as his overheated body starts metabolizing the alcohol, but she still climbs into bed with him and she still wedges herself into his side.

He groans. The bed creaks. He pulls his arm up so that she can tuck in. And then after she throws a leg over him, she feels his arm come down to cradle her back.

She breathes in his yeasty, beer-y body odor — it’s too hot to pull the blanket up — he is like a furnace right now. She presses her lips onto his bare skin, into the side of his chest. She sighs loudly, and she tells him, “Oh my God, this is _awesome._ I love this _so much._ I’m a fucking _crazy person.”_

By this point — he is sleeping. He has completely passed out. She can hear him start to snore.

She checks the time on her phone. She promises herself that she will get up and pull herself out of this amazing shit in fifteen minutes, and she will take her stupid, girly, moony ass home after she finishes unloading the growlers from her trunk.

She is such a skeeve though. She finds herself taking liberties with his body since he is asleep and not awake to make her feel self-conscious and ashamed. She runs the flat of her hand up and down his torso, touching his chest, his rib cage, his sternum, his stomach. He is crazy smooth, muscular, and also surprisingly soft in places.

She stops at the waistband of his boxers. She knows that it would be a real asshole move to take a peek at him when he’s like, fucking _unconscious._ So she doesn’t.

She just fucking makes the most of her fifteen minutes. She cuddles his unconscious body really hard and really squishily. She just keeps pressing kisses into his skin. She keeps turning on her phone to check the time in dread.

When she really has to get up — and she ends up pushing it to twenty minutes of one-sided cuddle time — she straightens her clothes in the dark — just in case she runs into one of his parents on the way out.

She looks down at him — at his uncovered, healthy, tight body. She experimentally tells herself that this is her man. She asks herself how she feels about it. She thinks. She hears the blood rushing through her head. She hears her heart thumping in her ears.

Then she tells herself, fuck it. She is already a fucking skeeve. She might as well cross the threshold into pervert territory.

So she bends over to kiss him. She licks her lips to wet them before she presses her hand to his cheek as she softly drags her mouth over his. His pout is soft, substantial, surprisingly well moisturized and not chapped — just a really pleasant pucker. She kisses him hard enough to hear an audible wet smack of suction, when she lifts up to stare into his face — to see if he is registering any of this.

He’s non-responsive — because he’s sleeping — but she can still taste some of him. She dips back in to give him another kiss. He is salty and warm and comforting and malty —

Oh shit.

She probably just glutened herself.

 

 

 

 

 


	32. Missy is sick; Grey is hungover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey goes over to help nurse the future love of his life back to good health. Unfortunately, there's not much he can do to make her feel better. Because he's, you know, terrible.

 

 

  
A loud boom — the sound of a closed fist slamming into the door of his bedroom — snaps him blearily awake. He coughs right away as his eyes tear up. He gags. His door is rattling as the banging intensifies. He weakly pushes himself into sitting position. He assumes that his dad is being a real asshole. This is why he gets to his feet, opens his door, and says, _“What the fuck, Dad!”_

But his dad is not behind the door. Grey has to look down. He sees a tiny, white, blond child scream, “EW! YOU’RE NOT WEARING CLOTHES!” at the top of his lungs before the kid runs off, shouting bloody murder.

Grey sighs and shuts his door back up again. He quickly pulls a t-shirt and some sweats over his-still feverish, slightly trembling body. He goes into the bathroom to brush the shit taste of stale beer and bacteria out of his mouth as he hears Jack continue making a commotion. He thinks — not for the first time — that maybe it’s about time that he finds his own place to live.

When he appears in the kitchen, he sees Bob and Cindy sitting at his parents’ kitchen table with his mom. He sees his dad at the stove flipping over some sizzling ham. The smell of it makes Grey want to vomit.

It’s ten. His dad tells him it’s about goddamn time he woke up. Grey kind of says sorry. He actually really just wants to go back to bed and sleep off some more of his hangover, but he cannot do that with his parents’ friends over. It is disrespectful to them. What he actually has to do is sit at the table and make small talk with them as he his head throbs painfully — in time with their grandson’s loudass screaming.

When he was younger, he used to try and argue for some freedom from his dad by telling his dad that his friends didn’t have to deal with the kind of strictness that he did. His dad was basically like, tough nuts. His dad was not moved. His dad did not think comparison is a decent argument. His dad used to say that white people may let their little ones run wild, but they are not white. So Grey has to park his ass on a chair and sit up straight. And he has to look alert. And he has to answer questions with yes sir and yes ma’am. Or else he’s going to get his ass beat. That is how people like them do this.

His dad puts some ham in front of him. He tells his dad he’s not hungry. His dad tells him to eat it, _anyway,_ because his dad is so pissed that he is so sloppy in front of his dad’s friends. Grey does not push it. He starts cutting the ham into small bites, and he starts shoving it into his mouth. The salt just sucks up all of the moisture and makes his mouth feel like a desert. He tells himself he needs to get the fuck out of this house so he can feel like an adult again. And also so he can sleep in a bed that actually holds his body.

Bob asks him what he did last night — because it looks like he had a lot of fun. Bob is chuckling. Grey tells Bob he went over to his friend’s house for dinner.

Cindy says, “Your mom was telling us you have a girlfriend? That’s exciting! Do you have a picture of her?”

He says, “Sorry, ma’am, I don’t.”

And then his mom says, “I have pictures of them!” as she pulls out her phone. “Lots of pictures!”

He’s like, “What? When did you take pictures?”

His mom is just so _creepy_ sometimes.

 

 

  
He goes to clean off his disgusting body off in the shower as his parents walk out into the garden to show their friends what’s going on with this mole invasion they have been contending with. His parents ask him if he wants to go with them and the Okafors to the nursery and then to lunch. Grey tells his folks he’s a grownass man, so he’s good on the nursery. He’s good on lunch. His mom fondly swats him and then pats his cheek, feeling his temperature. His dad asks him what his plans are for the rest of the day. Grey stops himself from reminding his dad that it’s Sunday, so probably a real fat nothing. His dad hates it when he does nothing.

Instead, he presses on his dad’s soft spot. He tells his dad he might try to link up with Missandei or something, see what she’s got going on.

His dad manages to nod eagerly as he simultaneously frowns sympathetically. His dad says, “Poor thing, having to deal with your miserable ass two days in a row. I expected her to wake me up to help drag you inside the house last night and everything — but she never did. Poor thing probably carried you in here herself.”

 

 

  
He ignores his own raging hangover as he texts her to ask her what is up. She texts him back and tells him nothing much. She’s just chilling and watching TV at her place. He tells her that he wants to stop by — because he has Tal’s food for her and the two of them didn’t get to spend much time together yesterday before he like, just got really hammered.

She writes back and tells him that she feels under the weather, so she’d rather not do anything today. He then assures he doesn’t feel great either. They don’t have to do anything — they can just chill and watch TV together. She tells him that she might end up napping, which makes him smile into the phone — because the idea of her taking little naps is so cute — he tells her that it’s fine if she naps. He tells her he doesn’t mind. She asks him if he’ll be bored — watching her sleep.

And he responds back with an emoji — a yellow face with its tongue sticking out.

He stops off at the grocery store before he gets to her place. He buys some fancy peppermint tea, a whole chicken, and a few knobs of ginger. He sees flowers as he’s standing in the checkout line. He thinks to himself that he has never bought a woman flowers ever — before he gets out of line to examine them. He decides against roses, because they are too romantic and cliched and desperate and meaningful, probably. He picks out bright orange lilies — for their apparent friendliness and cheer.

He feels utterly stupid and dumb, holding the lilies in the crook of his arm as he locks eyes with the door guy. The door guy remembers Grey — from the time he carried Missandei’s unconscious body up to her apartment. The door guy’s eyes soften, because he thinks that Grey is here to see his woman and give her flowers. This is actually completely true, but the flowers make him feel so transparent and vulnerable, so Grey has to awkwardly break eye contact as he says hello.

When she opens the door for him — he sees that her hair is tied in a curly bundle on top of her head and her face is devoid of makeup. She’s in a terry robe, with the flaps open haphazardly. She is wearing a t-shirt and loose drawstring pants underneath. She’s wearing her reading glasses. She looks like she has a cold or the flu.

He leans forward and he immediately gives her kiss — on her soft cheek — just a quick peck before he pushes his way into her apartment and starts unloading stuff in the kitchen. The only way that he can call attention to the flowers is to say to her, “Hey, where do you keep your vase?”

She slowly nudges her bottom onto one of her stools at the kitchen island. She quietly says, “Over the fridge.” She also says, “Thanks for the flowers.”

He immediately puts Tal’s food into her fridge. He asks her how she feeling. She tells him she’s cramping up a lot, and she’s really thirsty all the time. He tells her, “Well, why don’t we rectify that?” as he grabs a glass from her cupboard, which he fills with water and hands over to her.

Then he quickly butchers and rips the chicken into pieces, separating the meat from the bones before dropping it into a big pot of water with slices of ginger. He tells her that soup is easy to consume and will make her feel better. The ginger will settle her stomach.

He has picked up on her mood. Things are a bit quiet and strained and a little awkward. For this reason, he is regretting the flowers a little bit. The flowers are over the top, much like the kombucha was. He feels like he’s putting himself too out there. He reminds himself he has to be cool. He has to be careful. He cannot throw himself into a hole that he can’t climb out of.

He makes her and himself cups of really strong ginger and peppermint tea with a small glug of honey. He periodically checks on the chicken. He tells her the tea will also help her recover. He tells her he shoved some leftover kombucha and a container of Tal’s food in the fridge, though she should put Tal’s food in the freezer if she’s not going to eat it in the next few days. He tells her the probiotics might help her feel better, too.

He smiles sympathetically at her — as he own head pounds painfully — as she tiredly blinks behind her lenses and tells him it all sounds really nice. He stops himself from telling that he actually thinks that she still looks really pretty, even though she is not feeling very good right now. He asks her what she wants to watch on TV — if she wants to watch a movie or maybe she might want to try and binge a show? He tells her they only have the rest of the day together, so maybe they should tackle a miniseries? Maybe something under six hours?

She looks panicked — when she hears him say six hours. They have never hung out together this long before. They have only hung out together in three-hour chunks, at most. He assumes that she’s worried about going to the bathroom with him around again. He still thinks it’s not a big deal, so he tries to lighten the mood. He tells her, “Something weird happened this morning. I woke up, and I was like — undressed?”

She frowns. She softly says, “I’m really sorry.”

He leaves the stove. He circles around the island slowly, smiling at her. When he gets to her, he grabs onto the sides of her stool — it’s one of the swivel kinds — and he spins her so that she’s facing him. He visually examines her face, her eyes, her nose, her lips. These things are becoming familiar features to him — he can almost map them with his eyes closed now. Sometimes he wonders if he can take his immense attraction to her and split it half and use it compensate for what she doesn’t feel for him.

He softly asks, “Why are you sorry?” He quietly says, “Don’t be sorry,” as he ducks his head and tries to catch her eyes with his.

And then she just miserably starts confessing to him. He does not expect it at all. He expected her to smile and to let it all pass without comment. But she tells him about all of it. She tells him that every moment was just stupid, silly, and humiliating.

When she says the word humiliating, he straightens up and puts a little bit of distance between their bodies. He starts taking her words a lot more seriously.

She tells him that she was the one who took off his clothes — and he already knows this, of course — he figured that out — but she also tells him that she took like . . . liberties with him while he was passed out.

He does not like what this sounds like _at all_. He does not like the look of it either. He doesn’t like that she feels humiliated and she is on the verge of crying because she took liberties with his body. He takes another step away from her. In response to this piece of information, he says, “What did you do to me?” His voice is suddenly serious and grave.

She tells him that she touched him and ran her hands over his body a little bit while he was sleeping. She told him that she did this in bed with him for exactly twenty minutes while he was unconscious. She tells him she did it because she wanted to know what it felt like.

“Did you put your hands or anything in my underwear?” His voice is hard.

She hesitates. She pauses. And then she says, “No.”

He says, “Okay,” in a way that is unsatisfying coming out of his mouth — and unsatisfying in her ears. He tries and forces himself to joke about this. He says, “It’s kind of weird that you did stuff to my body while I was sleeping — but I guess it’s okay since we are dating, and everyone has their special kinks. I guess you’re into like, gray areas of dubious consent.” His joke doesn’t sound funny at all. It sounds stiff and really, really angry, actually.

This is when she starts tearing up. He assumes that she’s embarrassed, because she’s good at being embarrassed. He assumes that she’s being awkward about all of this, because she’s good at that, too. He assumes that she’s pitying herself because he is bad at disguising his anger right now — and yes, he supposes that she _is_ a victim of him even though he fucking _bent over backwards_ yesterday to make her feel comfortable.

Her voice is ragged and whisper soft, as she tells him that she also kissed him while he was unconscious.

In response this new nugget of information, all he says is, “I was drinking beer all night, though.”

She says, “That’s why I’m sick.”

He tries to get over this new bit of information fast — even though he feels weird about it — so he makes another joke to try to alleviate the tension. He tells her that he’s sorry she doesn’t feel well, but she also kind of brought it on herself.

The second it comes out of his mouth — he knows he’s an asshole, and he went too far.

She starts crying in earnest. The sound of it hurts his heart. She’s crying as she tells him that she’s sorry about the dubious consent thing. She tells him that she was just curious — and he thinks it sounds like he is a fucking zoo animal or something. She tells that it felt safer to touch him like that when he was passed out — as if he’s some piece of shit who makes her feel unsafe when he is awake. She tells him that he just never kisses her on the mouth, so she was just wondering what it felt like.

He doesn’t understand why all of this shit had to happen while he was fucking passed out and not even cognizant of what was _going on_ and what was _happening_ to him. He frankly tells her that the reason he hasn’t been kissing her is because he is pretty sure he will get fucking _punched_ in the fucking face if he dared to attempt it. He angrily tells her that the first time he kissed her, he stopped and asked for her permission like a fucking _normal_ person. She fucking said yes. So he kissed her. And she fucking froze and acted like she couldn’t wait for it to be _over._ He reminds her that the second time he tried to kiss her, she palmed his face like a basketball and fucking _threw it away._

He tells her that all she does around him is cower in fright whenever he gets close — so that’s why he hasn’t been kissing her. He rhetorically asks her why he would even fucking kiss someone who professed to feel no physical attraction to him. Is he just a stupid glutton for punishment then? He asks her if that’s what this relationship is.

He then says, “The last reason why I haven’t been kissing you is because I literally ingest gluten all day. I drink beer a lot. I eat bread a lot ‘cause bread is awesome. I don’t see you too often, so I get a little paranoid when I do see you. I didn’t want to _fucking assault_ you with gluten when I _did_ see you — but you figured out how to do it to yourself, didn’t you?”

She is just staring at him — her face drawn in just a lot of tension. Her eyes are welling up again. She says, “You’re being kind of mean right now.”

“Well, _yeah,”_ he says in derision. “I just heard a bunch of scary confessions about how I was almost date-raped last night. So give me a _second.”_

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I already apologized for this. I’m really am sorry. But you’re being such an asshole to me about this right now. You weren’t even close to being date-raped. I just cuddled with you, and I just fucking kissed you.”

“The problem is that you’re not very _direct,_ Missandei,” he says. “You can’t look people in the eyes half the time. And you can’t even tell people how you feel — even over the smallest fucking shit.”

They start raising their voices and they start loud-talking over each other. The argument starts getting petty, with them throwing these things that they have stockpiled on each other.

She tells him that he’s being an asshole — a lot. She says it over and over again, with hand gestures. He tells her that he does not even give a shit that he is an asshole. No shit, he is an asshole. Did they meet yesterday?

She’s pointing accusations at him and telling him that he has really figured out which shitty thing to say that he _knows_ would really hurt her. She tells him that it was bullshit that he abandoned her at Tal’s party — when she didn’t even know anyone. Grey tells her that he _didn’t_ abandon her, because she’s a fucking adult, not a child. He tells her, Jesus Christ, she’s an adult, therefore he does not need to fucking babysit her. She’s an adult, therefore she should be able to fucking go up to people she doesn’t know and just fucking introduce herself and have a fucking _conversation._

She tells him that it’s bullshit that he flirts with Alayaya right in front of her. It’s bullshit because he knows she is insecure.

“I don’t fucking flirt with Alayaya!” he says.

“I overheard you guys talking about how you used to have lots of sex together — all the time.”

“That’s a fucking _joke!”_

“Yeah,” she says angrily. “It’s really funny. You’re really funny.”

She tells him that he didn’t help her out at the bar — when that guy hit on her. She tells him that she was uncomfortable — and he _knew_ that — but she had to stand there like an idiot at the two of them became best pals and talked about beer.

In response to this, he says, “You’re such a girl. I didn’t realize you are such a girl.” And when he says this, he actually means that he’s sick of the impossible expectations that people like her have of him. He’s been torn a new asshole before because he forgot fucking random anniversaries. He’s been reamed out before, when he made a small joke that Alayaya kept in her mind for the entire night, just so she can scream at him about it when they finally got into the car alone. He’s been pushed away before because he fucking exhibited _feelings,_ and his feelings disgusted her because they were too out there. He really doesn’t think he needs to fucking pick a _fucking fight_ with a random guy to fucking prove that he is a man.

Missandei asks him, “What’s that supposed to mean?” because she took his comment to mean a bunch of other things. She feels dismissed and minimized and unheard and constantly belittled.

She tells him she has worked so hard to be more direct — and it _is_ hard for her — and he is just shitting all over her efforts like they don’t even matter. She tells him that he makes it hard to be direct because he is so harsh, judgmental, and he just doesn’t listen when he hears something he doesn’t want to hear. She tells him that he is similar to his father in this way. When he texted her, he _told her_ he was coming over, even though she expressed to him — multiple times — that she is not up for seeing him today. He just did not give a shit about what she wanted, so he just showed up anyway. And when he showed up, he started making a bunch of stuff and telling her that it will make her feel better — like she is _fucking stupid,_ like she hasn’t figured that chicken soup and peppermint tea will fucking _cure_ celiac.

He says, “You never fucking actually said, ‘Don’t come over. I don’t want you to.’”

She says, “I’m not really a person that can just easily say that.”

He tells her that he’s not a fucking mind-reader. He asks her what is easier — for him to fucking read deeply into every fucking innocuous statement she makes? Or for her to just fucking open her fucking mouth and just use words to communicate exactly what she is thinking?

She shouts at him and she tells him that she can actually do this for him. She tells him that she’s actually massively offended that he’s calling what happened to him like date-rape because it’s really not. It’s _not_ like _date-rape_ at all. He’s a fucking _guy._ He’s a fucking _man,_ so what does he even know about fear? He doesn’t even have a fucking clue about what it feels like to be terrified of men — because he is not afraid of much, is he? Must be so fucking _nice._

She shakes her head at him and says, “You’re being such a fucking big, callous asshole right now.”

“It’s _my body!”_ he shouts at her. “You don’t get to touch _my body_ without my permission. _Ever!”_

She says, “Okay.”

After about another minute of this, he tells her he is fucking leaving. She is crying. He tiredly tells her that they are just being mean to each other now — that nothing either of them are saying is productive.

At the door, she musters up the guts to prove to him that he is fucking wrong about her — even if it’s just a little bit wrong. She explicitly asks him, “Is it over? Are we done now?”

“Do you want it to be over?” he asks.

 _“No,”_ she says.

He reaches out to touch her wet cheek. His head is pounding. He thinks that maybe this wouldn’t have gone down like this if he wasn’t so fucking hungover. He thinks that maybe she is just right about every fucking thing about him.

 

 

 

 

 


	33. Grey and Missy make up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After giving the future love of his life some time to cool off, Grey comes back to her apartment and tries to work some things out using his words.

 

 

He ends up at a coffee shop because he wants to stay relatively close to her apartment and at some point in every hangover, he becomes ravenous. He wants to soak up the remaining alcohol in his blood with fatty, meaty carbs. He orders a huge bottle of water, a latte with full fat milk, a sausage breakfast sandwich, some yogurt — and also another one of the sausage sandwiches. He actually wants two of them. With cheese.

He ends up horking it all down right outside the cafe, balancing on a wobbly bike rack. He’s sitting outside so that he can watch people walk by with their dogs. He thinks that creeping on other people’s dogs might cheer him up a bit.

He considers calling up Drogo to shoot the shit — maybe to even get some advice because if there’s anyone who knows how to be an utter dick to his significant other and to also somehow make her feel okay with how utterly shitty he can be sometimes — it is Drogo. But Grey figures that it’s too fresh and too soon to get another point of view on this. He also figures that he doesn’t really deserve to have a nice chat with another person right now because he’s such a dickhole and dickholes don’t deserve nice things like conversations.

While the food goes down fast, it takes him a while to finish his coffee and yogurt because he’s working hard to balance the two things plus a spoon in his hands and as he also wobbles on this bike rack that is not designed to hold a human. He carefully sprinkles the packet of granola over his yogurt as he keeps his eyes out for puppies.

He sees probably fifteen different dogs in the time it takes him to finish his yogurt and coffee. He tosses his empty cups and sandwich wrappers away before he takes his water bottle with him into the cafe’s restroom to pee.

And after that, he texts her. He’s asking her if it’s okay with her for him to come back now.

She tells him sure.

And he has to text her back and be like: _Are you sure that you’re sure?_

It’s a serious question. Because she likes to tell him things in the affirmative and then later he figures out that _psych!_ She often means no when she says yes. It’s a lot like all of the fucking kissing they’ve been doing — oh my _God_ what the _fuck._

She texts him back. It’s a warning. She says: _Don’t be a jerk. Go ahead and come back here._

 

  
She kind of glowers at him when she opens the door for him, because he immediately says, “I just ate so much gluten and dairy, holy shit. Don’t try to make out with me right now, okay?”

She is not amused at all. She is not charmed. She doesn’t think he’s cute. She thinks that it’s amazing that he is _this_ arrogant, and he has _the balls_ to say that to her right now. She says, “You don’t have to worry about that, man.”  
  
He says, “Ouch. Friendzoned.” Because he is pathological sometimes. He really needs for her to know that he takes nothing fucking lightly.

She snaps at him. She says, “Grey! I get that you think you’re hilarious, but you are _seriously_ the _only_ one here who thinks you are funny!”

She warns him that she’s gassy and bloated and just feels like complete shit. She tells him that she doesn’t want to talk to him because he’s fucking annoying the complete shit out of her and she doesn’t even have the energy to fight with him some more. She asks him to please just keep his stupid and annoying face quiet for a while.

He sighs. And then he says, “Okay, okay. I hear you, Miss. You got it. I’ll zip it.” He walks back to the stove to check on his chicken. It is definitely overcooked. His fault. For picking a really ugly fight with her and then leaving for an hour so that the both of them could cool off. He forgot to turn off the the stove before he left. He washes his hands in the sink.

The chicken carcass falls apart as he tries to lift it up with ladles. He has to fish out individual bits of bones and meat and dump it all into a bowl to cool down. While he does this, she has has crawled back to her couch, to lie down on it in front of the low chatter of a baking show. He refrains from asking her why she even watches baking on TV, because she can’t eat any of the stuff. And then he realizes that’s precisely why she’s watching the baking show — it’s because she can’t eat any of the stuff.

This realization actually makes him feel really sad.

He kicks off his shoes as the chicken cools on the counter. He brings his water bottle over to her small living room area. He’s not sure where he should sit, but then he sees her pull her blanket-covered feet up, to create space for him at the end of her big sofa.

After he sits down, he sees her ineffectively try to kick a flap of the blanket over him. He notes that every sweet thing she does makes him feel like a complete dirtbag. He helps her out by grabbing a corner of her blue knitted blanket. He pulls it over his lap. He also pulls her feet into his lap. She momentarily goes rigid — because it’s unexpected — and because she must be remembering how he accused her of cowering every time he gets close to her. So there is a concerted effort in how she relaxes her body. She presses her toes into the side of his knee, bracing there lightly as she twists her body a little bit in place to get more comfortable on the couch. He lays his hand on her ankle, squeezing it a little.

 

 

  
He ends up falling asleep on her couch, in the middle of watching TV because of _course_ he does. She lets the TV run as she gingerly gets up and goes into the bathroom, with the fan running. It is actually massively inconvenient for her to have him around as she’s dealing with the fallout of accidental gluten consumption. She is really physically uncomfortable and gassy. She doesn’t want to poop in front of him. She also doesn’t want to fart in front of him. She has been kind of holding it in — and it’s been painful. She keeps having to take trips to the bathroom just to have some time to be gross in private. She also knows that diarrhea is probably just around the corner, but he’ll probably be gone before them. She has to remember to email in sick to work tomorrow. She has to cancel all of her meetings and reschedule them. She has to rearrange her entire week because she is a fucking moron who was stupidly impulsive. She plans on making it into work on Tuesday because doesn’t think she ingested very much gluten. She probably will bypass a lot of the psychological symptoms.

She is in denial. She’s still in denial about a lot of it.

Her anxiety is ramping up — she can feel it. It is coming. Her skin is already starting to crawl.

When she is back out in the living room, she sees him sleeping in his sitting position at the end of the couch. His head has fallen back and his mouth is open. His arms are stretched over the back and the side of the couch. This looks massively uncomfortable.

She nudges him in the knee — with her own knee. She also feels fucking terrible and guilty of the things he said to her. She also remembers him telling her that she can’t touch him without permission.

She says, “Grey,” as she lightly kicks him. “Wake up a little bit.”

He groans and his face constricts. He closes his mouth. He blinks open his eyes. He says, “Huh?”

“You’re sleeping,” she tells him. “Get up. Go sleep in my bed. You’ll be more comfortable there.”

He says, “No, it’s okay. I’m fine here.”

 

 

  
She watches two more episodes before he wakes up again. She’s curled up on her side on the couch, facing the TV, as he kind of softly gasps awake.

He gets up to check on the chicken — which has long gone cold. He washes his hands at the sink before he starts shredding it up with his fingers. He dumps it all into a tupperware container, before he shoves it in her fridge and tells her not to forget that it’s there — to eat with the soup. And then he pauses, and he says, “If you want to, that is. Sorry, I didn’t mean to like, _tell you_ how to eat.”

In response to this, she says, “Okay, let’s talk.”

 

 

  
The TV is off and he’s sitting in an armchair as she huddles underneath her blanket on the couch. The sun is setting, darkening the apartment.

She asks him how his hangover is going. He tells her that last nap really did it — he feels pretty good. She nods blankly. She refrains from telling him that that sounds nice — it nice that recovery is pretty quick for him. She refrains from saying this because she doesn’t want to accidentally sound bitter and petty and make them go down to that terrible place again. Instead, she tells him, “I’m sorry we fought.”

“Yeah, me too.”

She feels so fatigued and tired — it kind of feels like how it felt before her thyroid medicine kicked in. She kind of feels like there is no end in sight for any of this. She kind of feels like she’s going to feel like this — just terrible like this — forever.

Then she asks him why he and Alayaya broke up. She puts a hand on her stomach, pressing down on a gas bubble. The pain is aching and uncomfortable.

He looks at her. He looks regretful. He tells her that Alayaya cheated on him. So that’s why they broke up.

She says, “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s really terrible.” She means that she’s sorry for bringing it up. She says, “My dad cheated on my mom, with someone he worked with —”

“I remember,” he says. He means that he remembers her telling him about this.

“People who cheat are selfish,” she says, her face impassive but her voice is dark and condemning. She sneers. She says, “They only care about themselves and their own feelings. They think that how they feel matters _the most._ They think that the pain they are in supersedes everyone else’s and that their pain allows them to do whatever the fuck they want to those around them.”

He shrugs. He’s not sure what they are talking right here — if they are talking about him or if they are actually talking about her father. He touches his fingertips to his lower lip as he says, “It’s fine — that it happened. It was a long time ago. We were young. She was going through some stuff. We weren’t married. We didn’t have kids that we had to hold it together for. So it ended. It doesn’t bother me anymore.”

“It used to . . . bother you?” she asks carefully.

This kind of makes him smile — it’s probably the first time he has smiled in hours. He kind of lets out this sigh and relaxes a little bit into her chair. He understates it for comedic effect. He says, “Yeah, it used to bother me a little bit.”

“Is she . . . single right now?”

He says to her, “She’s dating someone.”

“Is that why you guys are not together?”

He stares at her — at her open face and her bright eyes and her utter and completely transparent nervousness and fear — and he is starting to understand more and more things about her. He’s starting to understand how she thinks and what she cares about.

He typically does not like to answer these kinds of questions, because they are invasive and they are personal and they are nobody’s business — except that they might kind of be Missandei’s business. A little bit.

So he tells her that he and Alayaya aren’t together because they are no longer compatible together. He tells her it’s also hard for him to get over Alayaya cheating on him. He can get over it in the sense that he can be friends with her — but to be romantically involved with a woman who once ripped his heart out and ate it in front of his face is pushing it for him. She changed him. He doesn’t trust as easily anymore. He isn’t as open anymore. He is more scared of rejection now. Like, he was always scared of rejection before, but after being rejected in such a profound way by someone he loved — fear of rejection became just a real intense monster that he has a hard time shaking. He looks at Missandei’s face and he tells her that this is probably why he’s been so scared with her — scared of being with her.

In response to this, she whispers, “I’m scared, too.”

He says, “Yeah?” as he kind of smiles and wearily shrugs. “That’s good. At least I’m not alone in that.”

“Are you with me because you can’t be with her?”

“No.”

And he refrains from giving her all of these reassurances. He doesn’t tell her that he fucking thinks she’s so fucking great — so that’s why he’s with her. He doesn't tell her that he feels lighter than he has in years, when he is with her. He doesn’t tell her that she makes him feel so fucking hopeful sometimes. He doesn’t tell her that she makes him feel like he can go without air.

He stops himself from saying these things to her because he is not romantic and there’s a big part of him that resents feeling like he has to play a role. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s boyfriend. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s man. He doesn’t want to engage in a construct where he just _loses_ all the time. He tells her that he’s not going to save her because he honestly expects for her to save herself. He’s just not a person that will tell her that the sun rises around her and the moon orbits her. He doesn’t like to coddle people. He doesn't like seeing weakness because it stresses him out. He feels burdened when he sees another person’s weakness. He tells her that he got his dick broken by Drogo, and then he had to groggily sit there in pain, as Drogo cried to him and told him how sorry he was.

“And it was like — yeah, thanks for feeling bad about this, but I am in a fuckton of pain right now. And my life is changed forever and stuff. But sure, let’s have you talk to me and tell me all about how bad you feel, for having done this to me.” He shakes his head. He says, “I barely have the capacity to deal with my own shit sometimes, honestly. I don’t have the capacity to pull in someone else’s shit on top of mine.” He stares back at her. He says, “I need you to come one-hundred, Missandei. I need you to just be _okay,_ so that I can be okay. I just can’t be the one to save you because this is going to _fail_ if that’s what you want from me. I can’t be the guy who is constantly around to reassure you and tell you that everything is going to be okay. I hate feeling like I have to lie because I feel like you can’t handle the truth. Does that make sense?” And then he sighs. He cuts eye contact to stare at her blank TV. He says, “Maybe we’re not ready for this.”

 

 

  
He has enough self-awareness to detect his own hypocrisy — so he revisits the touching. He tells her he blew up because he’s really sensitive and self-conscious and fucking _psychotic_ about his body. Which is kind of like, pretty understandable, right? He laughs — because he hears himself hyping his own self up, and it is just so typical. He also tells her that as weirded out as he is by the touching that happened while he was like, not conscious, he is also kind of weirdly flattered by it.

He asks her, “How do you currently feel about me — physically?”

He honestly expects for her to ramble on nervously about how she’s getting more and more used to him and more and more comfortable being around him. He expects for her to say that she likes hugging him — because obviously she likes hugging him. He expects her to be massively shy about this as she works overtime to spare his feelings.

But she says, “I’m . . . curious.”

“About what?”

She says, “All of it.”

He’s staring at his hands, because now he’s the one that feels awkward. He says, “Okay.”

 

 

  
They get massively tired of talking so much — of hashing and rehashing their family shit, their body-related shit, their relationship-related shit — that she puts a ban on it for the rest of the night.

So for the rest of the night, she gives them a break by telling him about _all_ of her fucking health issues _oh my God._

Because he asks. He asks her how a glutening rolls out for her.

She tells him it typically rolls out over three days or more. She feels really gassy and bloated on the first day. She tells him that she feels really thirsty and she starts to really cramp up. She tells him she is probably going to start shitting liquid chocolate soonish. He can stay this time and listen to it, if he really wants to. She is pretty fucking over it. She tells him she’s very tired and her body feels worthless and weak. She tells him that by day three, her hormones and depression gets a little wacky. She becomes rather irritable, angry, and emotional and just really fucking _depressed._ She sometimes ends up crying in bed all day for no reason. She tends to avoid people on day three because she doesn’t want to snap or be rude to people and have them hate her. She tells him she has to take time off of work when she gets glutened because she doesn’t have the time to be in-office, needing to go shit every fucking hour.

In response to this, he says, “Was it worth getting glutened? The kiss?”

It makes her smile behind her hand. She twists away from him a little bit to think. Then she says, “No. Sorry. It wasn’t.”

When he says goodbye to her at the end of the night, he grabs the flaps of her robe and he slowly pulls her to him, getting her close enough so that he can touch her hands momentarily. He is always doing this kind of shit to her, and it makes her feel _such things_ for him. She sighs as she tucks herself into him. She wraps her arms around him and she presses her lips into his neck. She tells him he smells clean and soapy.

He squeezes her tightly. She whispers to him and she tells him that she’s glad he’s awake for this. She also whispers to him and says, “Harder.”

He’s like, “What?”

She says, “Hug me harder.”

As he complies, he’s like, “Oh, shit. Okay. My mind went somewhere else for a second there. _Shit.”_ Then he adds, “Sorry. Does it creep you out when I say stuff like that?”

She says, “No.”

“So when you say no here — do you actually mean yes, it is totally creepy?”

She scoffs and drops her arms from him so that she can plant both of her hands on his chest and shove him back a step. He lightly slams into her front door — as he laughs. She accusingly says to him, “You are so annoying!”

“You like it,” he says confidently, grinning, leaving his back pressed against the door. “You are so into it. You want more of it.”

 

 

 


	34. Missy kisses Grey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy takes her relationship with the future love of her life to the next level! Smoochies are now part of their repertoire! Though, Missy also realizes that there is a certain byproduct that comes with the smoochies.

 

 

 

Her sick day is pretty predictable. She ends up just doing a lot of sleeping, a lot of sleep-walking, and a lot of shitting. She knows that she definitely got glutened when she sees her dark and fudgy morning poo in the toilet. She knows she definitely got glutened because her anxiety amps up a few notches. She worries about work — about missing meetings, about what her colleagues must think of her, about what they might be saying about her behind her back _now,_ about whether or not her work has been _good enough_ lately for this sick day to not count against her, about them figuring out that she’s expendable and that one day, software can probably fucking do her job better than she can, about how she is a fraud who has so many bills so she really can’t lose her job because she doesn’t have enough in savings to sustain her until she finds another job, about how her apartment is just too damn expensive but she was stupid and just distracted by shiny things — she is just stupid, stupid, stupid.

The more she just lies there and does nothing except for feel discomfort and pain, the more she just loathes herself.

He’s been texting her all day, and she’s been answering and giving him her really boring updates when she is conscious. The first few times he asked, she told him she didn’t feel great. By the fifth time he asks, she tells him that she fucking feels like hot garbage, okay? She’s starting to get cranky with him. She tells him why — that her anxiety has generally convinced her that he hates her and is completely disgusted by her true self — and she tells him not to even bother telling her that the opposite is true because she knows that he doesn’t like giving out reassurances because his dad abandoning him to let him deal with his track coach by himself has profoundly affected him as a human being and all of that. She gets it — she gets it. He is self-sufficient and strong and she pales in comparison to him. Fuck him. Anyway, she already knows he doesn’t hate her and he isn’t disgusted by her, so whatever. Her mind is just being an abusive shit to her right now.

She ends her really long text by telling him to just fucking leave her to die. She sarcastically follows up when she sees the novel she has written. She apologizes right after, for being so _dramatic._

As he arrives at her apartment after work — she’s vigorously slapping the crap out of her own face as he rides the elevator up, to get some more warm colors into her skin so she doesn’t look like, _so dead_ when he sees her.

He’s wearing a suit when she opens the door. And he also has another bouquet of flowers in his hand. They are pink and white carnations with a lot of greenery. She actually cracks up because the sight of him is _lunacy._ She says, “What the heck, Grey?” She says this because he just really _hammered_ the shit out of a point, told her that he’s not going to wine and dine her and give her affection or even let her know that he _likes_ her because that’s not part of his cool guy, unaffected dating style.

He looks distraught. He says, “I _know,”_ kind of in despair. He says, “I had a bunch of meetings with clients today, so I had to wear this stupid shit to work. And you just sounded so miserable all day that I wanted to — I wanted — I already made and brought you a shit-ton of food, man. I’d be wasteful to come with _even more_ food. So . . . here are flowers. They are already dead anyways, so you can throw them away later. This not fucking wasteful at all, you are right. I am smart.”

“Oh,” she says.

“I know,” he says nervously. “It’s dumb. I shouldn’t have —”

“I love them,” she says. “I love the orange ones, too.”

“Okay?” he says, questioningly. And then he holds out the pink and white flowers to her.

She takes them and then she generally just woozily melts into a puddle mostly made up of poop, just right there. She grabs his hand and pulls him into her apartment as she tells him she’s been drinking his kombucha. It is totally not helping at all! Probiotics are doing fucking _nothing_ for her! But it tastes yummy anyway.

She gets her step stool out, and she’s climbing onto it so she can grab another vase. She’s on her bare tiptoes as she makes a grab for the glassware. She asks him, “Did you eat gluten today?”

“I brushed my teeth and rinsed out my mouth before I came over, man,” he says, from behind her kitchen island. His voice is low. “The toothpaste was gluten-free, don’t worry.”

“Oh my _God,”_ she says. “That’s so presumptuous!”

“I _know!”_ he says, kind of shifting around in embarrassment. “I’m coming at you really hot. Fucking showing up in a suit. Fucking bringing you more flowers. Fucking washing out of my fucking mouth — God, kill me _now.”_

 

 

  
She’s been wanting to kiss him for a month now. He’s been wanting to kiss her for longer than that.

They are both aware of what is likely going to happen tonight — unless Grey just spectacularly freaks out and crams a bunch of gluten into his face so that he doesn’t have to kiss her. She doesn’t know how he’d do that, though, because there is no gluten at all in her home.

They are both being shy about this. They keep quiet about it — scared to talk about it directly. She’s scared she’s not going to know what to do and it’s going to make him be like, _wow,_ all that build-up for this bullshit! He’s scared she’s going to vomit all over him because he is so gross to her. They are both scared of lack of chemistry. They are scared that if the chemistry is not there, it will mean that maybe this relationship just isn’t going to work, and neither of them are ready to end the relationship yet.

He hangs out on her couch, trying to find a movie that he wants to watch — when she comes out of the bathroom again. His eyes don’t leave the screen as he asks her how it went.

She tells him that it was unsatisfying — and her butthole is on its way to become a raw, wet, itchy sore — and surprise — her period is here, too! She didn’t notice it was coming because it was hard to tell the difference between gluten cramps and period cramps. It’s also hard to tell the difference between gluten-related mood changes and period-related mood changes. She tells him that her body is just a mess of vaginal mucus and blood and shit right now.

Not only has she given up on being sexy, she is not even _trying_ not to be disgusting anymore.

Her rambling confession makes him smile at her — because he remembers when she used to ramble in nervousness. Now she is rambling because she is so ticked off. He actually finds this switch really appealing. He thinks it’s cute that she’s so weirdly pissed at herself right now. He thinks it’s really cute that she gets so easily pissed at him — that she is just so fucking unimpressed by him. He is kind of wondering if Drogo is right — that maybe Grey is inexplicably attracted to women who remind him of his father.

She raises her arms to stretch. She gets a whiff of herself. She flinches and then she angrily says, “Oh my God, I smell!” And when she catches him stifling a laugh, she asks, “Did my apartment smell when you entered it?”

He says, “Only like shit and BO.”

She looks horrified. _“Really?”_

 _“No,_ not really!” he throws back at her, snappishly, before he breaks out a smile. He says, “Goddamn, you’re so fucking _nuts_ right now, and I love it. Your place smells like normal.”

“Hold that thought,” she says, holding up a finger. She’s backing away. She’s nudging her bathroom sliding door open. She says, “Can you please turn up the volume on the TV? Can you please plug your ears?”

“Just turn on the fan and play some music on your phone,” he suggests, before he turns back to the TV.

 

 

  
They end up chatting on her couch about more casual things — in between her bathroom visits. He pauses his little stories every time she has to get up to drag herself up to trudge back to the toilet. He tells her about how he has to travel a little bit in the next month because there’s a presentation meeting he has to attend in Sunspear. Certain aspects of his job, he cannot tell her because of non-disclosure agreements and security reasons. It doesn’t matter anyway, because she’s not tech-advanced enough to get exactly what he does. She speculates that this is the reason his dad isn’t that impressed by Grey’s job — because his dad doesn’t understand enough of it — but she _is_ very impressed by his job. He just got a promotion, something he didn’t even bother telling his parents about because his dad is hard to please and Grey is really critical of himself.

She is also understanding, more and more, why he likes to abandon his date at a party. She understands more now, why he is kind of repulsed by words of affirmation.

He tells her he’s booked a ticket to go visit Azzie after his business trip next month, too. He tells her that he promised Yara that he’d take her cave diving so . . . he hopes that they don’t fucking drown and die in a freak accident or something.

She says, “Oh, Yara’s going with?”

“And Obara,” he says.

She says, “Oh. Cool.” And then after a pause, she just comes out and says it. She asks, “How come you didn’t ask me to come, too?”

“Because we _just_ started dating when I booked the tickets,” he says. “It seemed certifiably insane to be like, ‘Missandei, I know you just bitched me out at a restaurant for being a coward — but would you like to go on an international vacation with me?’” He laughs over the memory of getting bitched out. Then he says, “Do you want to go?”

“Send me the dates,” she says. “Send me your flight. I’ll see if I can make it work.” And then shyly adds, “Yes, I want to go. You say such nice things about the Summer Isles. I don’t know if I want to like, go diving though. I might just watch or just hang out on the beach while you guys go do that.”

“Dang,” he says, pressing his head into his closed fist, which is braced against the back of her couch. He’s smiling at her. “So you think we’ll still be together in a month. Okay — okay!”

They are in the middle of talking about their siblings when she has to get up to go the bathroom again. They are in the middle of talking about how they are so different from their siblings. Her brothers are outgoing, charismatic, excessively confident, and they always have been. Grey’s brother is relaxed, easy-going, and not especially ambitious.

He’s tugging at his tie when she has to get up to go again. His suit jacket is already draped over the back of one of her dining chairs. She asks him if he needs more water or kombucha or anything, since she’s already going to be up. He tells her that he can get it. He can refill their waters.

In the bathroom, she thinks that it is _crazy_ that he is just so _cool_ with this really terrible, really icky, really inconvenient thing about her. Her disbelief is so immense because she very much expected this thing about her to be annoying and mystifying to him, just like it’s been mystifying to most people in her life. In the bathroom, with her pants around her ankles, she thinks that he is bizarrely and effortlessly understanding. She wonders if it’s because of his injury — if that is the thing that makes him like this — or if he’d be like this regardless, because maybe this is innate to him.

Their water glasses are full and he’s sitting by himself on her couch when she comes back out. She wipes her wet hands on the back of her pants. She’s smiling at him.

And then she sits down right next to him.

She has a really long couch. It’s like, maybe seven, eight feet long. There’s a lot of space for two people on it. So when she plops down right next to him — it looks and feels _super intentional._

He actually says, “Whoa,” as he pulls his head back to look at her.

She says, “Hey.”

“Sup?”

She says, “We’re going to kiss for real tonight, right? That’s why you washed out your mouth, right?”

“Uh.” He clears his throat. He says, “I mean, I did it because of the _possibility_ of it — because of how our conversations have been going — but like, _no pressure.”_

“I want to,” she says. “Do you?”

“Like, right now?”

“Oh my gosh,” she says, smiling at him. “You’re _nervous,_ too! Oh my _gosh.”_ She brings up both of her fists. She presses them tightly over her mouth as she generally just looks at him all adoringly.

 

 

  
His own anxiety actually seems to calm her down. His anxiety actually seems to fortify her and make her feel more in control. The power goes to her head really quick. She generally makes him feel vulnerable and a little bit pathetic, as she gushes and squeals and bounces in place next to him, telling him that it’s so crazy that he is _this nervous_ about kissing someone he is dating, someone he has already kissed a couple of times before. It's so crazy that he's so nervous about kissing her! Because it's just her! She bounces up and down, giggling, and it kind of feels like she’s taunting him a little bit, as she tells him that he’s usually so calm and cool and collected in moments like this. He is usually so fucking smooth in moments like this. This is just — so _wild_ to her.

He feels his face heat up — as he kind of struggles to figure out what to say in response to this. Yes, of course he’s nervous. He’s nervous because he just — really, really likes her.

She twists her body so that she’s facing him on the couch. She makes him do the same, so that they are both sitting cross-legged, facing each other. It actually looks like they are about to meditate on the couch, facing each other.

She’s in the middle of a giggle attack, as she lays her hands on his warm shoulders. She asks him how he wants to do this. She asks him if she should like, go left and he go right? She says, wait. Doesn't that mean they're gonna go in the same direction? She asks him, does he want chapstick? She should probably go get chapstick because her lips are kind of dry.

He watches her, stunned, as she jumps up and runs into her bedroom. She returns quickly — within fifteen seconds. She’s smearing a tube of lip balm over her lips. She tells him it’s minty.

He says, “Missandei, oh my _God,_ there’s just so much pressure now. What if it’s not good?”

“If it’s not good, we can just keep practicing until we get better at it,” she assures him, with this bewildering confidence.

“Gimme that,” he says, snatching the chapstick out of her hand. He applies it to his own lips, shaking his head as he does so.

After he’s done, she presses her palms into his cheeks, kind of in a mimic of how he likes to hold her face sometimes. Her grinning is getting in the way of this — but she still leans forward, and she still presses her smile against his mouth. His lips are tacky from the chapstick. They are also minty from the chapstick. She sighs out dreamily as she just gives him a legit, solid, closed-mouth-but-still-too-sexy-for-a-relative kiss on his lips. She kisses him once, twice, and then she pulls away after the third peck.

She presses her forehead to his. Her hands are still holding onto his face — she starts blindly stroking his cheeks with her hands, feeling his stubble underneath the pads of her fingers and her palms. She opens her eyes to stare at him. She smiles at him kind of bashfully — because that went a lot better than she anticipated. Her heart throbs in her throat and her lips feel puffy and a little bit tingly from the mint and his mouth, as her smile just goes dopey. Because she is into him. She is like, _so into him._

Her forehead is still pressed to his as she says to him, “You know those scenes in romantic comedies, where two people who previously hated each other kiss for the first time — and sparks just start flying and the two people realize that they don’t actually hate each other — they actually love each other?”

“Yeah,” he says, his voice thick.

“I always think those scenes are unrealistic. First kisses are actually always a little bit nerve-wracking and a touch awkward, aren’t they?”

“Unless you’re really drunk,” he says, smiling back at her. “Then first kisses are like, pretty good. Because you’re uninhibited _and_ your standards are lower.”

 

 

  
She spends the rest of the night cuddled close to him, kissing him, off and on, as the movie plays in the background. It’s like, doors have been opened for them. It’s like, kissing is another thing they can do together to pass the time.

It’s the kind of kissing that she calls comfort-kissing. It’s tongueless kissing. It’s not urgent and sexual. It’s not this freight train that is barreling toward a goal. It’s more meandering and explorative. It’s affirming and warm and hazy and he _smells_ so goddamn good all the time. She likes the wet smoochy sounds their mouths make together. She likes being able to sit so close to him. She likes being able to run her hands over his arms and back — it is even better when he is awake because he’s breathing into her ear and he also makes soft little groans. She keeps pressing her mouth onto his pulse points, in addition to his mouth. She keeps running her lips over his cheek, whispering to him that she wishes he had fatter, chubbier cheeks. His cheeks are little sunken in and his cheekbones are kind of bony — because his face is nicely chiseled and masculine and stuff — and it’s nice — but she just wishes his cheek was little tubbier. She tells him to blow air into his cheeks to fatten them up.

He obeys, as he tries not to laugh.

She grabs onto his head and kisses him on the cheek again. His face is starting to smell like her spit. And she tells him that his cheeks are too taut now. It’s just not as enjoyable.

“You’re kind of a goofball,” he tells her, as he nuzzles her neck, his breathing and his mouth tickling her enough that she giggles and her hands and arms tighten around him.

 

 

  
His parents are already asleep when he gets home — because it’s so fucking late. He is stupid because he has to get up early for work tomorrow.

He still strips off his clothes, and he still throws himself into the shower though. He turns the faucet a little bit cold, as he drowns his face underneath the water. It feels like he’s trying to wash her off of his body — the smell of her, the feel of her, the warmth of her. He lightly smacks his head against the tile wall as the water flows down his back — because he just wants to have sex with her _so badly._ It is _maddening._ Because it’s becoming something realer than and closer than it has ever been. For this reason, it is also _terrifying._

 

 

  
The way that she thinks about him and them undergoes this subtle but pivotal shift after all of the kissing goes well. She starts projecting a little bit further ahead in her line of thinking. She starts thinking about events and activities that are two, three, even six months out. She starts wondering about which ones he’d want to go to with her and what things he might enjoy doing with her.

She also starts talking to him in her head, as she’s going about her day. She observes things like she sees a big purple and blue milkshake or she sees a dog with testicles and she can hear his voice in her head, making a wry comment about both things. She knows him enough that she can predict the things he will say now. She would actually qualify her knowledge of him as _robust_ and _thorough_ now.

Her mood is just so good — it’s so light and unencumbered. She is just _smiling_ all the time. She is just laughing all the time. She is always having to hide her amusement behind her hand because it is excessive and people have started noticing and commenting.

When Dany meets her for lunch, Dany pauses and says, “Whoa, you look really good. What have you been doing to your skin?” And then after five minutes of talking with Missandei — just five minutes talking about what she did over the weekend — laundry, grocery shopping, saw her parents, went to her niece’s nameday party, had dinner with Grey — Dany arches a really sculpted brow and says, “You guys had _dinner?_ How was it? Oh my God, tell me _everything._ I am so curious.”

Missandei is like, _“Huh?”_ because she doesn’t initially pick up that _dinner_ is Dany’s made-up-on-the-spot code word for sex. And then when it sinks in, she says, “Oh!” And then she shakes her head. She says, “Not _that_ kind of dinner. Not yet.”

Missandei can be a little bit more transparent and girly with her therapist, because deep honesty is coded into what therapy is all about. So she generally just squishes a cushion into her chest as she squeezes her entire body tight. She groans and tells Olenna that he is _so cute._ He is just _so fucking cute._ He is so fucking _cute,_ and it’s so frustrating and drives her crazy. He is just _constantly_ doing cute shit, and it just makes her go _oh my God_ all the time. She just _dies_ over how fucking adorable and just _yummy_ and _cute_ he is. He keeps making her kombucha. He has started doing second fermentations. He has started putting fruit juice into the batches so she can have different flavors. He recently just made her like, blueberry ginger kombucha and when he unloaded the bottles on her, she was like, _oh my God, just take all my money, take my blood, take my beating heart, take my eyeballs because it’s all yours._

She whines as she says, “I just want to _eat him up._ Ugh.”

Olenna laughs. Olenna says, “I’m glad it’s going well for you two!” And then Olenna just straight up says, “It sounds like you are dealing with some sexual frustration.”

Missandei’s jaw drops in wonderment. She flutters her lashes as she thinks about this. And then she says, “Huh!” She says, “I’m sexually frustrated? Do you really think so?”

Olenna gives her a droll smile like, oh she’s being such an idiot, and Olenna modestly nods.

“Whoa,” Missy says. “Is this what sexual frustration _feels like?_ I didn’t know!” Her eyes are wide. She says, “Huh!”

 

 

 

 


	35. Missy puts foot into mouth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy musters up the courage to talk about sex but then says the wrong thing to the future love of her life. It results in the both of them having a miserable week.

 

 

  
Missandei takes the new revelation in stride. It reminds her of the time many years ago, when Olenna told her she was clinically depressed, slightly agoraphobic, and that the episodes she was experiencing were called panic attacks. Olenna put her on medications, and it _changed her life._ Olenna is generally always right.

She’s never been sexually frustrated before, she doesn’t think. The only person she’s ever had sex with was her high school boyfriend. His parents were out of town so they had a really short thirty-minute window to do it in before she had to run home so that her folks were none the wiser about her newfangled sexual deviancy. She and Calvin had sex because they had been dating for almost a year. He told her that he was in love with her. He also begged, asked, cajoled, and argued for sex a lot. She loved him back, and she agreed that they were going to be together forever. So they had sex a few times before their terrible break up.

After that, she just went through a really long dry spell because of her mental and physical health issues. It’s really hard for her to feel anything besides depression when she is depressed. It’s really hard for her to want to be with someone when she’s probably-irrationally scared of crapping herself in the middle of sex. It’s hard to feel sexy and to want to take off her clothes when she feels utterly exhausted and brittle all the time.

She actually assumed that sexual frustration is more overt — like it’s literally stuff like what Calvin said to her years ago — that he could die from blue balls. She thought there’s more of a sense of urgency and of high stakes when it comes to sexual frustration. She remembers lascivious stories from her friends, mostly during college. Missy remembers Irri saying obscene things about her throbbing clit after a positive interaction with a hot guy.

How Missandei feels about Grey is currently a lot more subtle. His smile just _slays_ her. She just always wants that thing to be directed at her face — and she figures that that’s more romantic yearning than it is sexual. She likes to curl up with him and always be touching him, because his body feels good pressed against hers — and she figured that that’s more about receiving comfort than sexual fulfillment. She sometimes watches him while they are out in public, as he chats with a cashier or picks out straight two-by-fours. When she gets the opportunity to observe him from a distance, she feels grateful and kind of proud that he’s so handsome and cool and charismatic — because it kind of makes her cooler just by association, like wow, she is interesting and smart enough to land _that guy._ But that doesn’t seem like sexual frustration, either. It feels more like she is delusional because obviously people are shallow and probably assume that Grey is dating her simply because she is pretty.

She actually goes to the home improvement store with him because he needs to borrow her SUV to buy a few extra boards because he underestimated. He keeps crankily reminding her and himself that he actually didn’t underestimate as much as his mom just told him the wrong measurement because she’s a fucking lawyer who _sucks_ at numbers. He keeps bitching about it and telling Missy that it’s still his own fucking fault. He shouldn’t have depended on his mom’s measurement. He should’ve double-checked.

She’s here to help. And by that, they both know that she’s around to retrieve tools and to refill his water glass. She generally just sits on a lawn chair in his parents’ backyard and watches him as he angrily digs down into the ground with a shovel. As little as she knows about these kinds of chores, she can tell he’s done this kind of stuff many times before. Like, he just knows how to build a fence without needing to Google it on his phone. Like, he just knows how to jump onto the shovel, using his body weight and the force of gravity to jam the blade deep into the ground. He knows how to spear it into the ground, as a means of temporarily storing his tool as he switches to an ax.

He is currently pissed because there’s a knotty old tree stump in the way of the fence line. He is pissed because he didn’t realize early enough that this thing was in the way of his project. He is pissed because his dad was lazy and just cut the tree down three years ago. His dad didn’t get rid of the stump with potassium nitrate. The stump was previously hidden by a bramble of invasive blackberry bushes, which Grey has already spent days angrily attacking. Grey is pissed because he doesn’t even have the four to six weeks needed to break down the stump via chemical reaction because he has to go on his business trip. He is pissed he has to spend all fucking day digging this fucking shit out.

He alternates between digging with the shovel and hacking at roots with an ax. He is digging relatively close to the trunk because — he tells her — he doesn’t even have _fucking time_ to dig a fucking hugeass hole that he has to then fucking _fill in_ with soil.

He is completely just losing his mind and having a complete meltdown about all of this — and she has to work so hard to take him seriously and not laugh at how fucking adorable she thinks he is. She has to keep a straight face as he just slams his ax into the ground, over and over again — bitching out both of his parents underneath his breath. He is bitching out his mom for not knowing how to use a tape measure properly, and he’s bitching out his dad for being lazy and for not digging out the tree trunk properly _before_ he got cancer. He hacks so hard at the roots until the head of the ax gets completely stuck in the ground. She has to keep a straight face as she stares in awe — as he rips his baseball cap off his head, throws it on the ground, and screams, “It’s so fucking _hot!_ What is this — fucking — the _sun!_ I’m _sweating!_ I’m so fucking _itchy!”_ before he growls and then goes back to the ax, grinding out this grunt through his teeth as he grabs the handle, flexes his arms, and slowly pries it out.

He nearly falls over when the root lets go of the ax. He’s panting as he turns on her with his eyes wild, as he shouts, “Missandei! Are you _seriously_ fucking _laughing_ at me right now? Do you think this is _funny?”_

She wants to kiss him in these sorts of moments. She wants to touch his bare skin in these moments. She wants to hold onto him and feel him all around her in these moments. She wants to press into him. She wants to _smell_ him. She wants to take off his shirt for him so that she can get a better look at his body. She wants to taste his sweat.

So _this_ might be sexual frustration.

She is all wide eyes and innocence as she says, “No! I don’t think it’s funny.” She tells him she’ll go refill his drink for him.

He is slightly mollified when she comes back out of the house and hands him a glass of iced tea. The shovel handle is balanced against his shoulder as he takes a sip — and then he does a double take at the glass. He tells her that she spiked his drink.

She smiles and nods. She tells him that she did. She put a little rum in it. She did it because it just seemed like he needed a little something-something to take some of the edge off. It just seemed like he needed a little pick-me-up.

He grabs her by the back of the neck then. He pulls her to him — she has to take a few small steps forward. He lays a kiss on her mouth, wet and cold and sweet and slightly astringent from the tea, salty from his sweat. He slowly kisses her for a second before he pulls away to murmur thank you and to go back to his drink. He kissed her because he knows that she wants him to — because she brought him boozy iced tea instead of a glass of beer. Her efforts at not tainting his mouth are generally never lost on either of them.

She licks her own lips. And then she tells him that in therapy, she and her therapist talked about love languages in the last session.

In response to this pronouncement, Grey is like, oh brother. Because he knows that she’s about to pull him into an entire fucking conversation about love languages. He is almost at the point where he can read her like a book now. She is not subtle at all.

He says, “Miss, just cut to the chase. Just tell me what your love languages are so that I know whatever the fuck I’m supposed to give you more of.”

“Okay,” she tells him slowly. “So _your_ love language is _definitely not_ words of affirmation.”

“No,” he says, holding his glass up to his mouth to take another quick sip. “It is not.”

“So one of the love languages is physical touch,” she says. “And I was noticing —” She winces, as she tries to commit to this delivery. She realizes that she has chosen a really bizarre path to take to this question. She still says, “I couldn’t help but notice that we haven’t slept together yet.”

He freezes for a second. And then he says, “Oh, shit, for real?” He is staring at her, swaying slightly on his feet with the shovel and his glass, like he is dancing a little bit. He looks all serious. “I could’ve sworn that we might’ve. Maybe once?” He stares at her — at her almost completely blank expression — save for the slight furrow of her brows. He says, “No? Okay.” Then he goes back to his drink. He gulps the rest of it down in a series of continuous swallows. He then walks over to her little side table and he deposits the glass there. On the way back to her, he drops the act. He says, “So you are talking to your therapist about our sex life. Or lack thereof.”

She nods. She asks, “How come we haven’t slept together yet?”

“Lots of reasons, Missandei,” he says flippantly. “For one, I’m just not that sexually attracted to you.”

“Oh, so you telling jokes now?” she says dryly. “You think you’re comedian right now?”

He frowns. He raises his dirt-smeared hand to swipe at the beads of sweat on his forehead — his hand leaves a dark brown streak across his skin. She sees this, but she refrains from pointing it out, in case it becomes a new point of deflection and distraction for him.

He sighs. He says, “I’m sorry. I just get this way when I get really uncomfortable and feel put on the spot.” He is standing still now — stiff and rigid. He says, “I don’t know how to answer this. Why don’t _you_ tell me why we haven’t slept together yet. It’s not just on me.”

She hesitates. She looks down at her clasped hands. “Well, we’re being careful, and we’re going slow,” she says — quietly. “Because we like being friends, and we want to preserve our friendship.”

“Yes,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest now, hugging the shovel handle now.

“And you . . . are nervous about getting naked and . . . letting me see your injury,” she says, raising her face to look at him. “Because it’s such a personal thing. And you’re afraid that . . . I will reject you when I see it.”

He stares back at her. He grimly nods just once. He says, “Yes.”

“I’m scared that I’m too inexperienced, and that I’m bad at sex,” she says. “I’m scared that you’ll make me do something I don’t —” She immediately stops talking right then — as her heart generally starts just pounding in stress and dread — she shuts her eyes. And with her eyes closed, she tightly says, “I didn’t mean to articulate it like that. That was careless. I meant to say that I am scared of getting in over my head with sex, and I won’t know I’m in over my head until it’s too late — because I am inexperienced.” She opens her eyes, which are now a little hazy. She says, “I’m sorry I said that.”

“No,” he says, shrugging as his brain just slowly starts to detach from his body. He blankly says, “You were just being truthful. I can’t hold that against you.”

Her face is sorrowful and tense. She presses her lips tightly together as she says, “Grey — I care about you — _so much —”_

“I know you do,” he interjects, flipping his gaze so that it’s staring ahead at the expansive blue sky. He can see his parents' shadows moving around in the house. They are home now. He needs to talk to them about how he will not finish this fence this weekend. He needs to talk them about how he might need to spend more money renting some sort of machinery that will dig out the tree trunk faster, for the sake of saving his body the labor. Then to her, he says, “I haven’t been intimate with anyone in a really _long time,_ Missandei.”

“Me neither,” she says.

“It’s hard for me to be intimate with anyone,” he says.

“It’s hard for me, too,” she says quickly — kind of eager and desperate to regain some commonality with him because she knows she has messed up with him here. “We can figure this out _together,_ Grey. We can keep going slow.”  
  
After a short pause, he clears his throat. And then he says, “I’m sorry, Miss. Can we just put a pin in this? I’m getting really anxious talking about this. I need to concentrate on this bullshit instead.” He grabs the shovel handle and yanks it out of the ground. He says, “We can talk about this more later, if you want.”

 

 

  
He starts to withdraw from her a little bit after that sex talk — it’s not so much a conscious decision to be a dick about things as he just happens to be busy, and he just doesn’t want to work that hard driving himself ragged with exhaustion, trying to juggle everything. So he focuses and he prioritizes.

After Sunday, he is just not as available to her. He works on the fence on Monday and Tuesday. He goes hard right when he comes from work and changes his clothes. He plugs in earbuds and he spends hours digging holes for posts, mixing then pouring concrete in preparation for a lot of cutting and nailing after that. He just punishes his body from the moment he gets home until after the sun goes down. If he goes hard, then he doesn’t have to think that hard. His mom and dad come outside with plates of food to eat dinner with him on both days. His mom asks him if everything is okay on Tuesday night. He naturally tells her that everything is fine.

His dad asks him if everything is okay with Missandei. He tells his dad that everything is fine with Missandei. And then he waits for his dad’s brilliant advice. He rhetorically asks his dad if he should just forget that bitch — stunning both of his parents with the bitterness that comes out of him — and he doesn’t really feel like dealing with their lack of understanding, so he just unplugs the nail gun and starts wordlessly cleaning up before he goes inside to shower.

On Wednesday, he sees Drogo. They watch sports highlights at Drogo’s house. He brings over some growlers of his brew for Drogo to have. Drogo shows Grey his new car. Grey feigns interest in it. Then they park their asses in front the TV. Drogo also asks him if everything is okay — as Dany prepares herself a salad in the kitchen. Grey pauses for a long time before answering, because he is waiting for them to reveal to him that they have talked to Missandei and they have thoughts on his life.

They don’t say anything though. So Grey tells Drogo that everything is good.

On Thursday, he meets Tal for a run. His body is still incredibly sore from building the fence and removing the tree trunk — which he also had to hack to pieces because it was so big. Tal and him talk about space travel mostly, which he is grateful for. He tells Tal that there is so much space garbage up there — as he looks up to the sky. He tells Tal that this is like, a legit problem they are creating for themselves.

On Thursday night, she texts him to tell him that she really misses him. He doesn’t expect to get a text from her, and he didn’t expect for the text to say that. So it takes a little bit for the message to sink in. It takes a little bit for him to register what she just wrote to him, but when it does — it _hurts_ — right in the center of his chest. A lot of the things she says to him ends up hurting him.

He texts her back to tell her that he misses her, too. He tells her this because it is true.

On Friday, he goes to the boxing gym with Yara for a workout. She beats the crud out of his muscles, breaking micro-tears into them again. As lactic acid floods his system, she pats him on the chest and asks him if he has dinner plans. He wipes sweat from his eyes and he tells her that he is open.

So they end up meeting up with Obara at a late night restaurant. He ends up straddling a bench and trying to read a menu board as Yara and Obara plan out their meal together. They ask him if he wants to split a meat and cheese board with them. They also ask him what Missandei is up to tonight. He says yes to the meat and cheese board — he also silently observes that it’s the sort of thing he cannot eat with Missandei because even the meat has milk powder in it. He tells them he’s not really sure what she’s up to.

What he likes about Yara is that she drops things — because one of her least favorite things to do is talk about feelings.

Obara asks though. Obara asks him, “You guys are just in a fight, right? You guys haven’t broken up, right? Our trip to the Summer Isles isn’t going to be weird, right?”

He yawns because he is so sleep-deprived and he’s so fucking exhausted. He tells them that he and Missandei are not broken up. They are not in a fight. The trip will be just fine.

Obara says, “Okaaay. If you say so.”

Early on Saturday, she texts him to ask him what he is up to, because she hasn’t seen him all week and she wants very much to see him.

He’s in the midst of looking at apartments near his parents' house when her text comes in, so he doesn’t answer right away. He just wanders from boxy room to boxy room. He is trying to imagine what his stuff — which he has not seen in nearly a year — would look like in the blank space.

When he texts her back — when he is at the home improvement store buying picking up stain that he ordered for the fence. He tells her that he’s doing some work until probably late. He tells her he’s not free until after dinner.

She tells him to please come over anyway. She writes: _I’m really sorry about last week. I miss you so much._

He stops himself from getting mean and petty, so he puts off responding to her _again._ He stops himself from telling her that they are actually not in this together at all. Because it’s not that hard for her at all. She is gorgeous and perfect and all she has to do is decide whether or not to accept him or reject him. He refrains from telling her that he has the responsibility to be so amazing that he makes her fucking forget he _doesn’t_ have a fucking _penis._ His job is to overcome centuries of social conditioning and societal expectations. His job is to be so wonderful and so flawless that she never wonders what she is missing out on, so that she won’t go out to a bar with her study group partner, get drunk, and then end up fucking him in his dorm room at the end of the night. His job is to be so great that he won't have to sit there despondently as she sobs and confesses her transgression to him and tells him that she is in so much pain inside and that she is just so broken inside — so that’s why she has done this to them. His job is to make it so he doesn't have to sit there and say, _I understand._ How could she not do all of these things to him? He has no penis. He had to have seen it coming.

One of the things he is scared of is, say he musters up the courage to take off his clothes in front of her, and in response to the gargantuan display of trust, she tells him that she has figured out that she actually only loves him like a brother.

He has grown very attached to her. He’s grown so attached to her that lately, he’s been thinking that maybe he was actually wrong, maybe he _can_ be in a relationship that is devoid of sex — or maybe one in which she only has pity sex with him once a year, on his nameday or something. He has started preparing himself to make a lot of concessions because he cares about her so much, and he just does not want to lose her. He’s been feeling angry and embarrassed and just disappointed in himself, about all of the concessions he is grooming himself for.

When he goes into the house to take down a glass of water real quick, he sees his mom sobbing on the couch in the living room — with a white tissue clutched in her hand — and his heart stops. He says, “Where is _Dad?”_ as his eyes frantically search her face.

His mom says, “Your dad? He’s in the garage. Why?”

He presses his hand to his chest — as relief floods him. He says, “Oh my _God,_ Mom. Why are you crying like someone has _died?”_

She gestures to the TV screen. She says, “It’s just so sad.”

He says, “Mom, this is a children’s movie.” He says this because seeing his mom so emotional makes him feel uncomfortable.

His mom stares at him for a moment. He can actually see thoughts flicker behind her wet eyes. What he actually likes about his dad is that he generally always knows where his dad is at. He knows what his dad is thinking and he knows his dad’s mood. He is his dad’s little mini-me.

He has a harder time reading his mom. Sometimes he wonders the kind of regrets she has about him — because of course she must have regrets about him.

She pats the empty seat next to her. She says, “You gotta minute? You want to finish this with me?”

“Like, do I want to sit next to you as you continue to cry your eyes out because there is no one left who loves these imaginary toys?” he says. “Yeah, okay.” He walks over and takes the seat next to her. He sighs — kinda in pretend exasperation as he lifts his arm and brings it down around her shoulders.

She clasps her hand over his forearm. She tells him, “You’re so big now. I remember when needed me for everything. And then you turned two.” She pats his arm. She says, “I love you.”

 

 

  
When he gets to Missandei’s building, he says, “Hey, Lawrence,” because he and her door guy are tight now.

She is waiting for him when he gets up there. She is in her pajamas — which are apparently short-shorts and a loose white t-shirt. When she sees him, her face goes all nervous and anxious. She frowns at him as she swallows. She opens her mouth to speak — but then she thinks better of it and freezes.

Then — she says, “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean what I said. I know you’d _never_ do _anything_ to make me feel uncomfortable. I know that you wouldn’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. I _really_ know that. That was just a callous and thoughtless thing that I said to you —”

He walks up to her so that he can grab her face and kiss it. He brushed his teeth and rinsed out his mouth with wash before he left the house, so it is okay for him to do this. He runs his thumbs underneath her lashes, smearing the wetness there because he’s just so tired of the women in his life crying. He circles his arms around her waist as he kisses her hard. He sucks in her whimper of surprise. He picks her up just a few inches as he walks them backwards.

She only just starts kissing him back when he breaks the kiss. He says, “Hey, it’s fucking ten o’clock. I’m exhausted. Can I sleep over? I can crash on the couch.”

Her eyes widen — and then she eagerly nods. She counterintuitively says, _“No,”_ all soft and girly and in a daze. She dips back in for another kiss — this time shyly touching the tip of her tongue to his lips. When she pulls away, she says, “Not the couch.”

 

 

 


	36. Grey and Missy talk about sex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The future love of Grey's life feels so bad about what she said to him that she is working real hard to make him feel better. Her heavy-handed efforts are only ticking Grey off. But the bright side is that they hash out a lot of good stuff re: sex!

 

 

  
He’s quiet and introspective because he’s having a hard time holding onto his confidence right now. He generally views everything with cynicism, from the way she slowly drags him to her bedroom with both of her hands holding onto his — to the way she shyly looks up at him with just a bunch of information bleeding out of her face. He has to look away because every sweet thing he reads on her face, he thinks it is there because she feels pity for him, she feels guilt over the truth, and she is trying hard to rectify it all because they both know he is so just fucking _weak._

She tells him that one thing she’s always wanted to do with him is to cuddle in bed together. She tells him that cuddling in bed is basically like hugging while lying down, and they have mastered hugging, haven’t they. She’s working hard to keep it light. She’s working so hard to maintain his fragile psyche. This is why she makes a little joke. She tells him she was trying to not be weird about this — but too late, huh? She tells him she’s so creepy sometimes.

It all still sounds pretty upsetting to him — her efforts — but he ignores and he complies anyway. It’s late. He’s real fucking tired. He can let her make it up to him, and they can wipe the slate clean and try to move on. He has fucking missed the _shit_ out of her. He has been missing her all week because not only did they not see each other because he’s such a punkass bitch, they also didn’t chat at all.

For this reason, he might as well just let this shit continue to be really hard. He will continue sabotaging his own efforts at keeping his head on straight by sleeping in bed with a woman who does not feel enough sexual attraction to him.

He clears his throat as he kicks off his shoes, as he decides to leave all of his clothes on except the hoodie, in order not to freak her out. It is fine. He showed up in sweatpants a t-shirt, and a hoodie. He pulls the hoodie off and then lamely tries to fold it. And then he doesn’t know where to put it — so she quickly takes it out of his hands and disappears into her walk-in with it. In that time, he crawls to the head of her bed, where he pulls back the blanket and sheet. He neatly drops down and presses his face into her pillow. It smells just like her, which makes total sense. It is fucking amazing.

He feels and hears — rather than sees — her body crawl in next to his. She shuts off the lights. She carefully lies down and arranges herself next to him. She’s gentle and considerate. She stares at his profile and generally keeps a healthy distance away. She whispers to him conspiratorially. She says, “This is so cool. We’re in bed together.” She grabs his hand underneath the covers and she intertwines their fingers together, as she rubs her thumb up and down the center of his palm.

He can’t fucking take it anymore — her overcompensating niceness. This is why he squeezes her hand — because he’s trying to remember to physically pull her close when he is saying words to push her away. Maybe the two things will negate each other. He says, “Missandei. We’re cool. Don’t worry about it. I’m good.”

Her voice is soft and breathy — and a lot closer to him than he expects. She says, “I know we’re cool. I know you’re good. I’m not worried.”

He feels her hovering. And then he feels her breath on his face. And then he feels her lips press down on his, at the same time her hand leaves his to press down on the center of his chest.

When her hand shifts down about two inches — possibly just a slip of balance and weight distribution — he freaks out a little bit. He’s scared of where her hand is going to go — just to prove a _fucking point_ to him. He immediately reaches up to grab onto her wrist, to hold her hand in place. He also snaps his head to the side to break away from her mouth. He’s breathing hard, trying to pull in enough gulps of air. She has stilled next to him.

“I know you feel bad,” he says. “I know you care about me and you feel guilty. It’s okay. I’m completely fine. You don’t have to do _this._ You don’t have to make anything up to me. We can just go to sleep, okay?”

In response to this, she softly says his name. She actually says, “Nudho,” as she lowers herself back down to her side. She shimmies so she’s pressed up against his body. She grabs onto him and squeezes him so tightly in her arms.

He starts tearing up — for reasons that he doesn’t understand. It just pisses him off. And then his anger triggers a litany of other abstract feelings — he’s tired and he’s exhausted and he’s been doing everything that everyone is asking of him and it is _never going to ever be enough_ — that the tears don’t really subside. He whispers, “Fuck,” as he blinks up at the dark ceiling.

She wriggles up higher to kiss him on the side of his face. She knows he’s crying. She goes even higher and she ends up grabbing onto his entire head and just cradles it to her chest. He actually stops leaking tears at that — because his face is in her boobs. She’s not wearing a bra. This is just beyond _fucking ridiculous._

He tries to nicely push her off. He says, “It’s fine. I’m okay.”

“You’re not fine,” she says, holding on, wiggling against him to ward off his struggles. “And _that’s okay.”_

“Fucking — don’t tell me what I am.”

She’s not falling for his trap. She knows him _so well_ at this point, so she can see him lay it out for her to step in. She doesn’t snap back at him for instance, because he likes to fight in order to move on from the more difficult things. She knows that he was taught how to do this by his father. She knows that there’s a lot of pressure on him to be perfect, because he has to compensate for what his older brother isn’t — and in another way, he has to make up for what his entire family has lost.

She says, “Shh, just go to sleep,” as she hugs his head a little bit harder, as she kisses the top of it. She is never this high up his body. This is kind of neat.

He says, “What the fuck? Have you lost your mind?”

“You’re tired. You’re cranky. Just go to sleep.”

“You’re talking to me like I am _fucking child.”_

“That’s because the little child inside of you is crying out in pain right now, Grey.”

He goes rigid in her arms. She’s half expecting him to flip the fuck out — and she completely plans to continue responding with calmness.

But then he relaxes and then he starts laughing. It’s loud and unexpected. He twists and he buries some of his laugh into her boobs. She’s initially like, _whoa_ about it. Because this took a turn in more ways than one. She feels his hot, damp breath muffled in her chest. She doesn’t know how she has ended up here — with her pressing his face into her boobs as she tries to cheer him up — this is _exactly_ what she _actually_ meant with her dumb mistake-blurt. She is actually scared of getting in over her head with sex because she is a _fucking moron._ She’s scared she’ll start out doing one thing — and then in a blink of a moment, she is getting fucking motorboated by the guy she is dating and then it’s like — what _happened here?_

He ends up grabbing onto her hips. He ends up grabbing firmly onto her body as he pulls his face away from her chest and he starts sliding her down.

When they are face-to-face again, he says, “Thanks. That was funny.” He slides his arm underneath her pillow, underneath her head. He asks, “Is this okay?”

She whispers, “Yeah,” as she curls into him.

He says, “Cool. Good night.”

 

 

  
She is first to wake up — and it is _awesome._ She never forgot that he’s in bed with her, not even when she was sleeping. His presence was always constant — warm and present and comforting against her back as she slept. It was _fucking awesome._

She knocks him awake with a shove. Because he told her she can’t do things to his body when he is unconscious. She has not forgotten that lesson. He sucks in a gasp as he says, “What?” blearily. He says, “What’s _happening_ right now? Are you okay?”

She smiles at him. She says, “I just wanted to talk to you.”

He's blinking himself more and more awake, even as he rolls over and buries his face deeper into her white pillow — fucking _unreal._ She likes the contrast of his skin color with her pillow. She likes the way his mouth drags against the pillow as he groans. She likes the way his voice sounds — all low and sleepy and growly — as he groggily says, “Babe — that’s so rude.” He grunts as his face scrunches up, as he stretches in her bed. He mutters to her that his body is just killing him with the aching soreness. He softly grinds out a soft, _“Fuck,”_ as rolls his shoulders around, trying to get a little bit of relief.

She didn’t know that having a man in her bed entailed all of this stuff, too. She thought kissing, yes. Sex, yes. Cuddles, yes. Conversations, yes. Sexually charged stretching — no.

So she gets in there. She wets her lips with her tongue right before she plants them against his mouth. She lets out a sound at the contact, because this is _exactly_ like how she’s been imagining it. She starts running her hands all over the place — kind of half-heartedly kneading his muscles — making him spasm and scoot away from her when she digs her fingers into his stomach.

He is still trying to wake up. He tries to put space between them without hurting her feelings. He ends up just whimpering and rolling away as she tries to go for his stomach again. He’s on the edge of the bed as he says, “You’re coming in really hot right now, holy shit. I just woke up.”

 

 

  
She has a toothbrush for him this time around. She proudly hands it to him with a flourish, with a little bow. His mood is still a bit standoffish, despite the ground that they gained last night. He still thinks that she is working too hard to make him feel better because he is pathetic. And he does not need pity kisses or pity gropes. Like, he is _fine._ Truly.

She takes him out to brunch. She tells him she will eat a boring fucking salad and everything. And he can eat pancakes and hashbrowns with cheese sprinkled on top — and he can have biscuits with milky gravy and put cream in his coffee and everything! She tells him she will pay. He looks at her like she’s being a nut — but she just honestly just wants him to _come back to her_ — just so _badly._ She wants him to joke around with her some more. She wants him to smile again. She just wants to hear him laugh. She wants him to cheer up. She knows that wheat-y carbs are fabulous — she has these memories of the joy of eating wheat. This is her logic — that he’ll feel better if he gets something yummy to eat.

She watches him poison and taint the inside and outside of his mouth with buttered toast and jam. She gives him this small and secretive smile — which he catches. It makes him slow down his chewing — it makes him feel really put on the spot actually. He feels like she is scrutinizing.

It’s when she takes him back to her apartment and starts trying to massage the sore muscles in his shoulders that he is like, _enough._ He pulls her hands off him. He says, “Missandei — you are making me feel like a charity case right now. I appreciate the effort. But it makes me feel uncomfortable.”

“You’re not a charity case,” she says, trying to make another grab for him. “I _want_ to touch you.”

 _“Okay,”_ he says — mockingly. He moves further down on the couch, getting more space from her. “You don’t have to try so hard.”

“I’m not trying hard,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says sarcastically, gesturing vaguely. “You’ve been acting super normal today.”

In response to this, she says, “I want to tell you something.” And before she can feel any which way about it, she blurts out, “I feel sexually attracted to you. My therapist told me so.”

And after a long pause, he says, “Yeah, _okay,”_ in that funny, mocking voice again.

It seems like she expects him to jump for joy over this bit of news, but he is actually aggressively unhappy and confused by all of this. He is just really stunned by the last twelve hours. He showed up after she made him feel bad about himself. She made him sleep in bed with her. And then she made him cry. And then she kind of made fun of him for it. And then she took him to a glutentastic brunch. And she keeps trying to rub on his body like she thinks she can erase the shitty thing she said to him with touching.

When she asks him if he feels the same way about her, he rolls his eyes at that question. He wonders if the Summer Isles are going to be like this. He wonders if it was a mistake to invite her. Yara flippantly mentioned to him that it seems like it’s way too early for him and Missandei to take a vacation together. Yara is a fucking radical truth-teller, so she might be right.

Missandei starts just giving him a headache by being all up in his head. She starts throwing a lot of therapy-speak at him, about process and cognitive dissonance and about brain chemistry. She starts to tell him about her journey at arriving here — from zero attraction to some attraction. She throws the word ‘cute’ out, over and over again. She assigns it to him — she says that he’s super cute, and it sounds like a lot how he talks about dogs. They, too, are super fucking cute. He does not want to bang a dog though.

He starts to wonder how long it’s been since she’s had sex with someone. He starts realizing that as much as he’s been required to talk about Alayaya even though that shit is so far buried in the past — Missandei has not shared much, if anything, about her past relationship. He starts to wonder just how much experience she has, because — he has been noticing — the fearful and hesitant way she talks about sex actually feels _young._

She keeps asking him how he feels — without giving him much space to think over how he feels. She is exhibiting another form her anxiety right now. It is subtler, so she can’t tell that she’s doing it yet. He just wants to snap at her and ask her to be quiet for just a fucking second — but he remembers that she does not like it when he yells at her.

So he just rubs his face and smears his words in his hands as he tiredly says, “I think you are overcompensating. I think that you think your new discovery is the silver bullet. Missandei — it is not. But I get it. You feel bad for accidentally admitting that the very idea of having sex with me still scares the shit out you because it’s gonna be _so fucking weird —”_

“That’s _not_ what I said at all!” she protests.

“What things!” he asks, his voice cracking from the stress. “What things do you think I’m going to _make you do?”_

“I don’t know!” she says defensively, her eyes going wide.

And then she holds up a finger — a wait-a-minute finger as she thinks — as she collects herself and tries to figure out the best course of action. She is trying not to respond in blind panic. She deeply inhales.

And then she just decides to lay it all out there. She says, “I’m not advanced! I don’t know how to do like, advanced sex things! I don’t like — I don’t — like — I don’t know how to do any butt stuff. I don’t know anything about lube brands. Do they typically have _gluten_ in them — and will the gluten like — mess with things like, _down there?_ And I don’t know what kind of batteries vibrators or dildos require. Do dildos even _require batteries?_ I don’t want to have to pee on you. I don’t want to have a threesome _ever._ And I don’t want to do anything involving hitting or pain.”

He is just stunned. All he can say in response to this is, “What — the everloving — _fuck,_ Missandei?”

They have a pretty wild and quick-moving conversation after that. He wants to know _what he has fucking done_ to lead her to think that he fucking wants to be _peed on_ or _hit_ during sex. She stutters and tells him her anxiety is a crazy bitch sometimes. And Moss said —

“Oh, _that_ explains it,” Grey cuts in. “You talked to your brother about this. That was _real smart,_ Missandei.” After a short pause, he explodes with, _“Why_ would you talk to _your brother_ about _this,_ Missandei! Does he have an expertise on _my body_ that I don’t know about?”

“He brought it up himself!” she shouts back in anguish. “He just started _talking_ — and I haven’t had sex in years — so I’m like — oh, do people do it _all different_ now?”

“Why didn’t you just talk to me about it?”

 _“Okay!”_ she shouts. “Okay! Hindsight. I _see it_ now. I’m _sorry.”_

His voice is hard and punching, as he tells her that she can fucking just _relax,_ because he’s probably not going to ask her to pee on him. She can just _fucking relax_ because he’s probably not going to ask her to have a threesome with him. He tells her that he understands how she got confused there, because he is _definitely_ known for being super fucking _chill_ and _whatever_ about letting other people see his naked body in a sexual context. He just fucking takes off his clothes _all the fucking time_ and has sex with people indiscriminately because that’s _totally_ what he likes to do.

This is when she randomly decides to say, “You kissed Irri with tongue on the first date!”

And he is like, “What the fuck!” because he cannot _believe_ this shit right now.

She says, “Why don’t you kiss me like that?”

“Because you’re different people!” he says, and he’s actually trying to grasp at some straws here. He’s trying to regain his bearings again. He doesn’t love this. He doesn’t love her tendency to hold little observations or facts about him in her head. He doesn’t love that she whips them out and randomly slams him in the face with them. It’s just a really unfair way to argue.

“Are you just —” She sighs miserably. “Are you not as attracted to me as you were to her?”

“Oh my God,” he mutters, because he is having a fight with a sixteen-year-old girl instead of an adult woman. He’s looking around her apartment right now. He is thinking that he might need alcohol to finish this conversation right now. He holds that thought. He shakes his head angrily. And he condemningly says, “I went on _one date_ with her a year ago. I’ve been with you for _months._ But yeah, let’s compare the two things like they are the same.” He shakes his head. He says, “I don’t like feeling like I have to give out reassurances to soothe your _ridiculous_ insecurities.”

“Oh, screw _that,”_ Missandei says derisively. “We all need to be comforted sometimes. Jeez. Say something nice to me sometimes!”

He actually heads into her kitchen after that. He starts opening up her freezer to hunt for the bottle of vodka that he brought over. It was left over from Tal’s party, way back when. Oh shit — she was fucking _crazy there, too._ This is becoming a pattern. Nevertheless, he is really glad he is a fucking genius and had the foresight to shove this bottle into her ice drawer.

He pours himself a glass. He tips the bottle’s neck to her, as if to ask if she wants some too? She is glaring at him with her face all pinch like a pissed off gerbil or hamster. He shrugs. Because she is probably going to be pissed at him a lot in the future. This is probably just their dynamic. He caps the cold bottle and starts drinking.

He worries that he’s going to end up being just the catalyst for one woman’s sexual awakening. He worries he’s going to be the person that helps her open herself up again — before she moves on with the rest of her life. When Azzie applied to college, his personal essay was about how he has a brother with a disability and how that made him into a more empathetic person and stuff. When their dad read that essay, he shut that shit down real swiftly and made Azzie redo the personal statement. But the truth had already revealed itself by that point.

And after his first sip, Grey says, “I want to fuck you. _A lot._ I don’t kiss you dirty because I don’t want to accidentally start pushing you _to fuck_ or make you feel pressured into it. Because we are just not ready for that fucking mess. _Obviously.”_

In response to this — her eye contact is just _unwavering._ She looks tense as hell. And he is thinking, yes, yes, yes, this is fucking disturbing and completely terrifying and not at all what she signed up for. This is actually _real._

He throws her own words back against her. He says, “How do you feel about _that?”_

 

 

 


	37. Grey is away on business

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy just generally falls deeper for the future love of her life as he continues working through his issues and fears. Yara slaps Missy in the face. Then they all board a plane to the Summer Isles! But not before Grey's dad gives Missy a talk and some responsibility.

 

 

 

He generally acts like he’s laying down the law when he tells her that they are not having sex any time soon, so the both of them can fucking _relax_ a little bit. He tells her there’s still so much they don’t know about each other.

She is not a fan of how he sometimes talks to her like she is _remedial,_ but she _does_ agree here. They aren’t ready to have sex. There’s a lot she still doesn’t know. She’s very inexperienced, and she never anticipated that the second person she’d have sex with in her life would have this significant injury that would require her to be like, _creative_ in sex. She doesn’t want to be unprepared. She doesn’t want the first time they have sex to consist of her constantly asking him, “Okay, so what do I do next?”

He is not a fan of the way she talks about sex. He does not like the word creative. He does not like the way the idea of sex with him is framed as out of the norm, though she’s not the first or the only one who talks like this. He does not like how there’s a vague sense of performance in how she talks about sex. He does not like how it seems like — during the act — he’s going to have to forget and suppress all of his complex emotions about sex so that he can have the capacity to put all of his focus on her and her feelings and her needs, to make sure she is okay and breathing as he is just fucking _drowning_ and fighting for _air._

This is how he knows that having sex with her right now would be a fucking disaster. He’s just going to get mad at her over it.

While he doesn’t want to create a system where she has to constantly jump over hoops in order to prove to him that she truly cares about him and that this is not a phase, he is just so fucking terrified. And he’s the only one who has the responsibility of protecting himself. Like, if he doesn’t look out for himself, then that’s just it. There is no one else who will look out for him.

She tells him that it surprises her — to learn that he wants to have sex with her — apparently pretty badly. She thinks it’s a little bit funny that he’s so stoic and guarded about how he wants to get naked with her, so she smiles over it.

He doesn’t think it’s funny at all — he does not think his feelings are funny — so he generally looks like he wants to punch her in the face a little bit when she brings it up.

So she quickly moves on. She tells him that the admission surprises her because he’s been so good at hiding it. He’s been so good about keeping it all very clean.

He shrugs.

And she tells him that she always was under the impression that men have a real hard time controlling their urges. She doesn’t have much insight on this because she’s not a man. She’s not ruled by testosterone. She just knows that a bunch of men at her company risked their jobs and livelihood because they couldn’t stop themselves from creating pornography about her. She just knows that there was something bleak and inevitable, in the way her dad justified the cheating — and also in the way her brothers were a little bit faster to accept it than she was. Things were going terribly in her parents’ marriage. They were fighting all the time. Three needy kids was a ton of pressure apparently. It didn’t matter that her mom was the primary caretaker of them and yet found it within herself to not go out and cheat. Her dad just didn’t feel like himself and apparently being a man is much harder than being a woman, so he cracked because he needed to feel like a man again — something like that.

She tells Grey that her ex-boyfriend used to act really distraught whenever she put a stop to the making out, because it was escalating too fast. He used to make her feel a little bit bad, whenever she left him hanging.

She asks Grey how he deals with sexual frustration.

He bluntly tells her that he sometimes masturbates to clean out his pipes. Sometimes he takes cold showers. Not having a penis is handy because he doesn’t have to be dealing with erections all the time. He tells her what often happens is that he just feels like he really wants sex when he is around her. And then he holds that thought in his head. And then he just doesn’t act on it. The end.

She says, “Seriously?”

He dryly says, “Yeah, man. It’s not that hard to not be a predator.”

 

 

  
He brings her mom a mixed bouquet of mostly white lilies when they go over for family dinner. He mutters that he’s doing this even though he is a lost cause, just a godless heathen. Missandei smiles at him as she grabs onto his hand and squeezes it in support on the front stoop. He is wearing a blue shirt with buttons because she asked him to. There is no trace of pink anywhere on his body.

It’s the first time he’s meeting the kids. They are overwhelming even though they don’t give much of a shit about him. They take his presence in stride, and then they just tear apart the house with their running and their screaming during play.

He talks a little bit about his job with her dad because her dad asks out of sheer politeness. Her dad was on his way out of the department by the time cybercrime was becoming a big thing, so her dad lacks a certain expertise. He’s old-school. He’s a bit of a Luddite.

Grey — she relearns — is really good at explaining things using metaphors and analogies — without making other people feel stupid about what they don’t know. She watches him talk her dad through data encryption really kindly and really patiently — and that makes her feel a little bit emotional. She tells herself that it does not even matter if her parents do not like him. Because she likes him enough for all of them.

Her brothers like him a lot — for sure. And they are terrible. They are physical so they grab onto him a lot, even though it clearly makes him uncomfortable and he quietly asks them to please stop. Moss makes Grey jump all the time, by slamming his thick hand into Grey’s butt because he thinks it’s funny to watch Grey yelp and get nervous about his butt. Moss tells Grey, “Man, I am so jealous you guys are visiting Azzie. I would _totally_ go with you guys, if I didn’t have a wife and two kids just pulling me down and drowning me like dead weights.”

To Missandei — Moss also reminds her a lot of their dad — in obvious and non-obvious ways. Even in the way he charms other people.

Safi takes offense to his words — which was Moss’ intention. He sasses her to them. He grins and he rakishly tells them that women are just thieves of fun, aren’t they?

Here, Grey says, “Nah, man. Disagree.”

“You have to say that because my sister is going to lay into you later if you don’t preach the good word,” Moss says, sounding really confident about this. “But I know that you know what’s up.”

“Nah, man,” Grey says. “I’ve been uptight and ruining parties with my easy-going attitude since diapers, man.”

 

 

  
She sits on his bed next to his suitcases as he packs for both his business trip and the Summer Isles. The trips are pretty much back to back, so she’s going to take his suitcase and babysit it — in part because of the tight schedule, and also because he told her he tends to underpack so she wants to capitalize on his extra space by putting in her shoes and hair products and lotions and stuff.

She softly tells him, “I’m going to miss you while you are gone,” as she reaches her hand out to run it down his constantly moving arm.

“I’m gone for like, four days, man,” he mutters, as he tries to do socks and underwear math in his head real quick. “You’ll survive.”

“Grey, I’m trying to be cute with you right now,” she says, smiling at the concentration he is applying as he holds up a navy blue pinstripe tie and a indigo pinstripe tie. “Come on.”

“I just have to get this done, Miss,” he says, as he finally chooses the indigo tie. “Just let me get it done and then I’ll hang out with you.”

She waits patiently and mostly quietly as he quickly folds up his underwear and undershirts into perfect little rolls and tucks them into his Summer Isles suitcase. She thinks that, oh man, she’s going to be messing that up later when she crams her stuff on top of it all. She refrains from admitting this to him right now, because he might as well be surprised and get cranky about it later.

When he’s done, he zips up both suitcases and pulls them off the bed. He drops them softly to the ground and rolls them to his closet. Then he plays dumb for just a few seconds, fiddling with the address labels on his suitcase before he widely grins and then pounces on the bed, landing right next to her.

The bed basically sounds like it’s about to break — it makes a terrible cracking sound — as he fuses their mouths together, kissing her fast and hard. He’s been doing this really odd, self-sabotaging thing — he’s been trying to prove to her that he’s scary and rough. He’s been trying to convey to her that she is soft and girly and he doesn’t think she can’t handle him at his most authentic. He shows her he’s so dangerous and threatening by doing stuff like being utterly respectful and careful with her body.

She runs her arms over his shoulders before winding them around his neck, as she breathes out a contented sigh against his mouth, as she lies down, pulling him on top of her.

He’s been giving her a teeny bit of tongue — ever since she accused him of giving her _no tongue._ As he tries to prove to her that she’s not really ready for all of him, she’s been trying to prove to him — with her actions because he is fucking deaf and obstinate with words sometimes — that she is at least ready for _some_ of him. She is attracted to him. She has accumulated a lot of knowledge since the beginning of all of this. She has learned that everyone else was wrong and stupid — attraction _can_ and _does_ grow. This is something she accepts about herself now — that her feelings for him only becomes more and more immense the longer she knows him. Sex is no longer terrifying the way it used to be terrifying. She does not worry that he is going to hurt her — like, at all. She knows that he will not hurt her. The greatest risk in sex is actually that she will unwittingly hurt _him._

The sides of her knees are pressed into his ribcage, as he moves from her mouth to her cheek and then to her neck. She stares up at his ceiling and sharply inhales as his blunt teeth nips her and his tongue soothes the bite. Her hand claws into his shoulder as she holds him in place and breathes heavy through the feel of his wet mouth on her skin.

She reaches down, lightly scratching down his spine. She’s got the material of his shirt in her hand. She’s pulling it it up. Her knees sabotage her efforts — she stretches the shit out of his shirt to free it from her own grasp.

And then they both jump at the loud knock on his closed door. They both freeze as they hear his dad’s gruff voice, saying, “Dinner’s ready, guys.”

Grey lightly coughs. And then he says, “Okay, thanks! Be right there!”

She is mortified. She presses her hands to her hot face. She says, “Oh my God, he probably thinks we’re having sex in here.”

“He does _not,”_ Grey says, pulling his body off of her. He’s straightening his shirt and his pants. “He knows we’re not having sex.”

“What?” she says.

“Yeah, I tell my dad too much, I know,” he says, as he rubs his chest, trying to calm down his hammering heart. “He’s a doctor, so we talk about my sexual health just about all the time. And I’m close to my parents. So _run._ Run for the fucking hills, Missandei.”

“My dad’s a cop,” she says, sitting up and straightening her own shirt. “And we don’t talk about like . . . crisis de-escalation techniques.”

“Why not?” he says. “That would be really interesting to talk about.” He shrugs. He says, “After my accident, my parents were really concerned about like, my sexual development — because my dad’s a doctor. They were afraid I’d like, turn out to be, um, a clinically depressed psycho virgin who murders women for sexual gratification before burying bodies in the backyard — or they were afraid I’d be weird and would have to live with them forever — so we started talking about sex in our household. Like, a lot.” He reaches out to grab her hand, to pull her off the bed. “Does that wig you out?”

“Just the serial killing part of that,” she says, smiling a little bit. She can imagine his dad saying that to Grey back when he was too young and too adorable to get such dark lessons.

She tells him that the rest of it actually sounds really sweet and really conscientious and deliberate, and he just sounds really _loved_ and cared for. She tells him that she’s kind of jealous because the only time her parents talked about sex with her was to tell her that all boys rape and in order to not get raped, she needed to avoid being alone with boys. She also needed to not wear sexy clothes, like sleeveless shirts.

She is pretty sure her face says it all — when they walk out to the kitchen. She is pretty sure her lips are swollen, her hair is messy, and her body is telegraphing to his parents that she was just doing sexy stuff with their son in his childhood bed.

This pretty much gets confirmed when his dad says, “I really think it’s a good time for you move out, son. You’re an adult. And you really need your privacy. Hell, I need _my_ privacy back.”

“Dad, have I been keeping you from walking around the house naked at night?”

His dad smiles. Then his dad starts explaining to her all the food that he made — he tells her about the bean stew, the risotto, the sauteed veggies tossed in olive oil and lemon. He pauses in the midst of it — and he says that he suddenly realized that he also made a vegan meal. Like, there is no meat in this at all. He laughs loudly and then starts congratulating himself. He tells everyone that he’s such a great cook.

When it’s time for her to go, she’s too shy to ask Grey for alone time in front of his parents. He _does_ walk her to her car though — which is parked in the driveway, with a great view of their entire brightly lit living room. She is not opting to stay for Jeopardy because she has work in the morning.

She lets him hug her as she presses her face into his shirt, not caring that she is smearing her eyeliner on it. She mutters that she’s going to miss him so much. She’s going to miss the cuddles. She’s going to miss the very sporadic sleepovers. She’s going to miss the smoochies. She’s going to miss the very respectful tongue-kissing.

He laughs. He says, “You’re being so — so extra right now. It’s just a few days. Then you’ll see me in the Summer Isles.”

“I know it’s just a few days,” she whispers, as her hands come up to hold onto his face. “I just . . . I just care about you _so much._ So much, Grey. I just like you _so much,_ you know?”

 

 

  
When Missy sees Yara, Obara, Irri, and Dany for dinner, Yara greets her by lightly slapping her cheek — not enough for it to hurt, but enough for it to shock. Missy tries to fight off Yara, but she’s cautious and Yara is stronger. Missy just ends up whimpering and taking a few light slaps to the face as Yara tells Missy that she’s been _really_ looking forward to a long-awaited, hard-earned beachy vacation with a side of cave diving. So Missandei better not fuck this up for them by bringing the drama and having fights with Grey while they are trying to all relax and stuff.

Missandei recoils — she looks utterly _disgusted_ over this accusation. She says, “Okay, rude!” And then she smiles and says, “I promise nothing.”

Yara shakes her head — biting back her own smile. She says, “You flagrant bitch.”

Dinner is just pretty awesome. They haven’t seen each other in a while, so there’s a lot to catch up on. Irri is seeing someone new, and she is cautiously optimistic about it. She tells them that she’s going to try and be different — think more with her head and less with her heart. Dany tells them that she is stressed out because she has fundraising goals to meet with an upcoming event — but after the event she’ll be pretty relaxed and chill again. They all laugh at that. Obara tells them her little sister is getting married, so she recently went wedding dress shopping with her sisters and Ellaria, and it was just about the worst thing in the world. Yara blithely says, “Your mom is _hot,”_ apropos of nothing.

"Stepmom," Obara corrects.

When it’s her turn to give an update, Missandei just shrugs. She tells them same ol’ same ol’. Everything is normal. Work is good, verging on very good sometimes. She’s been getting along pretty good with her parents, actually. Her brother is just about healed. Her nieces and nephews are just growing like little weeds. And Grey is good.

“Grey is _good?”_ Dany asks, smirking a little bit.

Missandei says, “Oh my God, shut up,” as she rolls her eyes, as she kind of laughs over it.

She deflects for a little bit. When Yara asks her what in the hell they even fight about — because she likes to imagine that they are like two little cute penguins who paired up and just waddle around together holding each other’s flippers. Yara says she can’t imagine what her two little penguinos could be even be arguing about. Missandei laughs and plays it up. She says that they sometimes fight over who gets the last bite of gluten-free cake.

And then Obara makes it all serious and legit. Obara tells Missandei that the last time they apparently fought — Grey did not look great. Like, he looked good in the sense that he always looks good and healthy. But he didn’t seem like he was doing okay. He actually seemed like he was very upset and hurt, and he showed up to dinner just really quiet and really disengaged and despondent. It was actually pretty sad.

“Babe,” Yara says, looking over at Obara, shooting her a look, making it clear to the rest of the table that they have clearly talked about this between themselves. She clears her throat. She says, “I’m really looking forward to working on my tan. We should try to go to a topless beach so I don’t get tan lines.”

“Take pictures!” Dany says cheerily.

 

 

  
She talks to him on the phone every night while he is on his trip, because he has nothing to do besides hang out in his hotel room after dinner. Sometimes she puts him on speakerphone and talks to him as she cooks her own late dinner. She walks him through what she’s doing, and she lets him criticize her cooking from afar because she knows it is fun for him.

Sometimes she gets ready for bed and burrows underneath her sheets and blankets. Sometimes she smells her bed real hard and she tells him that she can kind of smell him in her sheets. She pulls the cover over her head and she starts whispering conspiratorially. She tells him that she misses his presence, she misses his warmth, she misses his hands, she misses his affection and his kisses.

She hears him sigh. She hears him say, “Miss.” And she waits — holding her breath — for what he’s going to say. He just says, “I’ll see you soon. I _promise.”_

She says, “I am so _into you._ Do you believe me now? Now that you’ve had some time to sit with it, do you feel how I feel about you? Do you still think I’m trying too hard?”

After the longest fucking pause _ever,_ he finally says to her, “I know how you feel about me. Thank you.”

 

 

  
His dad ends up driving them to the airport, even though Grey is flying directly to the Summer Isles from Sunspear. It is a little bit awkward for her because Grey is not even around to be the reason for this favor — his dad is just being nice because he likes her. She still doesn’t know how to accept random acts of kindness. When she shyly tells him on the phone that they can just take a cab, he tells her to save her money. He tells her that he has nothing going on and he’s bored. He doesn’t mind driving beautiful women to the airport.

She is surprised to see Yara talk to Grey’s dad with such familiarity — she was unaware that Yara ever hangs around Grey’s house — but Yara loudly says, “Wassup, Mr. Torgo! Nice ride!” as Grey’s dad pulls up to Missandei’s apartment building in his Prius.

She and Grey’s dad awkwardly and politely square dance around the suitcases. She tries to lift her bags herself, and he tries to get her to stop it. She realizes that he is super chivalrous, strikingly so. And Grey is not like this at all.

She nervously explains why she has two suitcases. She doesn’t want him to think she is a high maintenance bitch. She tells him, “One of the suitcases is Grey’s. I have it because he didn’t want to take two suitcases to Sunspear. And also I wanted to put some of my stuff into his suitcase. I mean — not too much extra stuff. Just like, I wanted to put in my inhaler and a pair of running shoes in there, in case I like, decide to exercise and have an asthma attack during —”

“Sweetheart,” he says, interrupting her. “I literally do not care why you have my son’s luggage. I do not care what you have done to it. That’s yours and his business.”

Hugs get exchanged outside of the airport. Obara hugs Grey’s dad even though they met for the first time today.

Grey’s dad holds onto her hands, and he squeezes them. He tells her to _not_ let Grey’s brother talk Grey into doing weird shit, okay? He tells her to try and keep him in one piece.

Yara says, “Don’t worry, Mr. Torgo. I’ll keep an eye on him, too.”

“That’s cute, dear,” Grey’s dad says to Yara. And then turning his attention back to Missandei, he says, “Take care of him for me, okay?”

This is such a freaking meaningful and sweet moment — like, it’s like Grey’s dad is passing the baton to her, to be Grey’s number one and to be his advocate and his protector — _but_ all she can think about is asking him what exactly he means by _weird shit._ What is the weird shit she is supposed to dissuade Grey from doing with Azzie? What if she fails at this dismally because she can’t recognize it when it comes up? Is it drugs? Is it _all drugs_ or just the hard ones? She would definitely freak out if she saw him using anything involving needles. She might not recognize pills — she wouldn’t know if he’s taking aspirin or if he’s tripping acid. Is weird shit like, excessive drinking? Is it feats of unreal athleticism that may result in death? What? What? _What is it?_

“Missy — did _you_ pack _your_ anti-anxiety medications?” he asks.

She nods vigorously. She says, “Yep!”

After they wave bye to him and drag their luggage through the sliding glass doors, Obara casually observes that for an older guy, Grey’s dad is pretty handsome. She says, “He must’ve been pretty hot in his heyday,” as she scans the security checkpoint. “It just goes to show we all get old, and we all de-hottify.”

 

 

 

 


	38. Missy is a trooper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because she is surrounded by a bunch of superhuman athletic people who like to drink and party, Missandei feels self-conscious about being the dud of the group. She forces herself to rally and rally hard, for the future love of her life, who is like, um, we don't have to do this. Our girl ends up getting the sleepies at the end of the night, leaving the future love of her life to get her ready for bed.

 

 

 

She actually has to pop a quarter bar of Xanax on the plane. Because one of her irrational fears is getting glutened, getting stuck on a six-hour flight, and forcing everyone on the plane to watch her projectile shit everywhere or — even worse, causing the plane to make an emergency landing because she cannot stop herself from shitting her pants. She skipped breakfast and hasn’t eaten in over fifteen hours, to prevent this from happening, but her body always finds a way to make stuff come out of her butt if it’s really motivated to.

So she takes her Xanax to calm her mind down some. It also just makes her very sleepy. She ends up knocking out before the plane has even left the runway. She curls herself into Yara’s shoulder and just snoozes as Yara strokes her cheek and tells Obara that Missandei is so fucking cute sometimes.

She is still Xanax-groggy when the plane lands. She has to force herself to look alert as she goes through customs by herself. It is so hot. She yawns when she meets back up with Yara and they wait for Obara to get through. She blinks slowly as she keeps a lookout for her suitcases on the conveyor belt.

When she finally spots him — near the doors — he is slowly pacing back and forth. He’s talking on his phone, and he’s wearing casual clothes. He’s wearing color — easily blending in the crowd. She sees his face transform, as he spies them, as he sees her.

She sees him flick the bill of his hat up a little bit. She is kind of speed-walking now, leaving Yara and Obara behind. She is dragging both suitcases behind her as he hangs up his phone. When she gets close enough, she sees his smile. She hears him say, “Why, hello there. Fancy meeting you here.”

She is like, _shut up,_ as she makes a grab for his face. She puckers up and abandons the suitcases as she softly collides into his body. Her mouth has locked onto its target —

And then pulls his hat completely down so that it’s covering his entire face. She is kissing the top of his hat.

She’s about to ask him, what the hell?

Into his hat, he says, “I just ate a wheat noodle bowl. Sorry, Miss. I had an hour to kill, and I was just like — I just _wanted_ it. Also, control yourself.”

He lifts his hat and places it back on his head as he leans over, grins, and gives her a squishy-wet kiss on the cheek and a quick hug, before he bends down, stacks a suitcase on top of another, and grabs the handles of their luggage. When Yara and Obara catch up to them, Yara is snickering. Yara says that she saw that entire reunion of her two little penguins go down, and it was hilarious when her boy penguin totally noped her girl penguin’s romantic gesture.

Missandei is pressing her hands into his back, kind of helping him along by lightly pushing — as they walk out into the blinding sunshine. Missy says, “He just ate gluten. Otherwise he’d be _all over this.”_ She gestures up and down her body. She is wearing jeans that she _must_ change out of because it’s so bloody hot. And she is wearing a dark KLPD t-shirt that she also must change out of, because it’s so bloody hot.

Azzie has been waiting for them. He pulls up in a large white pick-up that is covered in hazy dust and red mud. He lets out a whoop of happiness as he leaves the engine running, as he hops out and bypasses _the rest of them_ to scamper over to pick up his brother. Grey says, “Oh my God,” as he clutches his hat to the top of his head and bends his knees as he gets lifted up high.

Azzie says, “Baby bro! You’ve gained weight!” as he bounces Grey in his arms, as he pats Grey on the bottom before giving it an assessing squeeze. “Wow lil’ man. Hefty. You look so _good.”_

“Thank you, thank you,” Yara says, grandly taking a bow. “I take all of the credit.”

“Um, what did you do?” Missandei asks skeptically, smirking.

“Uh, I _trained_ with him,” Yara says. “I made that body. You’re welcome, Missandei. You are very welcome.”

Whatever awkwardness that would have ensued from that comment gets bypassed by Azzie. Grey’s hat ends up getting knocked off anyway, because Azzie finally drops him down to the ground to give him a viciously hard hug, making Grey stumble backwards a few steps as his hat drops. Missandei scurries to pick it up so it doesn’t get dirty.

She’s still holding Grey’s hat in her hands and she feels a little shy when Azzie finally gets to her. She’s afraid that he’s going to pick her up or start touching her body in an overly familiar way. She also remembers the last time they talked. He told her that she should date his younger brother. And she . . . pretty much did just that. Not because she was told to, but because she thinks Grey is amazing and stuff.

“You remember Missandei, right?” Grey says, gesturing to her, reaching out to take his hat back.

“Of course,” Azzie says smoothly, reaching out to hug her softly. “It’s not possible to forget Missandei.”

This makes her flush even harder under the really intense sunshine and heat.

They load all of the luggage in the back of truck and squeeze into the tight space. Azzie is kind of messy — there are food container wrappers strewn about and also some clothes and gear stacked in the back seat.

They drop Obara and Yara off at their hotel, a modern high-rise sticking out amidst stout candy-colored two-story buildings that house local business and homes. It makes Grey go, “Whoa, that’s new.”

Azzie offered to also put Yara and Obara up at his place, but they want privacy. “You know,” Yara says, right before she hops out. “So we can have sex without you pervs watching or listening in.”

“Plus, the hotel has a pool!” Obara says, hopping out right after.

Then Azzie drives recklessly, speeding down the two-lane highway, weaving in and out of cars. He laughs when she silently reaches up to pull at her seatbelt strap, testing its tensile strength. She stares out the window at palm trees, sky blue buildings, sand, and sun, as Azzie and Grey exchange information and a little bit of gossip about their parents.

Azzie lives in a musty-smelling two-bedroom bungalow with a small porch and a long driveway. The carpet is red and has sand permanently embedded in it. The furniture it in is sparse — a sofa, a rug, a lamp, a TV. The main bedroom is an add-on, a sunroom encased in glass. It looks like a real bachelor pad.

In the first bit of alone time they’ve had since arriving — they are settling into the room — she looks around at the eclectic seashell art on the walls — something Azzie inherited, no doubt. She says, “We are sharing a room.”

“Is that okay?” Grey says, shoving his Sunspear suitcase into the closet so he can just ignore it for the rest of the trip. “I can sleep on the couch if you’d like space.”

“No, don’t be silly. Of course it’s okay,” she says. “I’m looking forward to all of the snuggles and cuddles and smoochies in bed.”

He is not currently charmed by this cuteness. He is actually smelling the blankets and the sheets. He says, “Oh, hell no. This shit has to be washed before I lie in it.” He starts stripping the bed efficiently. He bundles it all in his arms as he starts screaming his brother’s name. He walks out of the room with the laundry and when he doesn’t come back, she goes out and looks for him.

She finds him sitting on the patio with his brother. They have beers at the feet and also in-hand. Oh, awesome. So there goes the smoochies.

Azzie holds up a bottle to her. He says, “Want one, Missy?”

She shakes her head, as Grey lightly hits his brother with the back of his hand. He says, “She can’t eat gluten, man. Remember?” Grey then makes a fist and lightly punches Azzie in the arm. “You _better_ remember. You _better not_ poison her while we’re here.”

 

 

  
As the sun sets, Azzie picks up Yara and Obara takes them all to one of his favorite seafood restaurants, a shack on a dock. Missandei is Xanax-crashing, so she is quiet and introverted as everyone excitedly gabs around her. She lifts her face into a soft and reassuring smile every time someone asks her if she’s alright. She fake-peppily says that she is great!

Grey spends _forever_ talking to the server about the food, even going as far as standing up and walking into the food prep area, to look at the ingredients, before he comes back with the paper menu and points out to her what she can eat. He tells her a lot of the food here is actually naturally gluten free because wheat is hard to grow on the islands because of space, soil erosion, the temperature, and a whole bunch of other stuff. He tells her wheat is a relatively new import.

She nods sleepily. She quietly tells him that he can pick her food for her. She is sure whatever he picks will be great.

In response to this, he tilts her face up so he can look into her eyes. He says to her, “You’re a little . . . smushy right now. What’s up with that?”

“Oh, she’s totally drugged up,” Yara helpfully supplies.

His brows go up at that. And Missandei allays whatever worries he may have by saying, “I get really anxious on planes.”

“Ah,” he says, in realization.

Dinner becomes loud and frenetic, as the restaurant fills up, as more and more empty beer bottles get tossed into the straw bucket at Azzie’s feet. She doesn’t feel super great, but she doesn’t want to ruin everyone’s good time because this is exactly why she stopped getting invites to nameday parties — no one wants to see the sad gluten-free girl standing around awkwardly eating raw carrots instead of nameday cake. She’s also in the weird in-between purgatory, where the effects of her medications are exacerbated a bit because she hasn’t eaten in so long. At the same time, the way her medication makes her feel has killed her appetite. She picks at some pieces of fish and shrimp, and she puts in a valiant effort at being cool. She’s telling them all that the food is _so good._

And it _is_ — because everyone else is inhaling food, chatting about how they are so excited to dive into water with really specialized equipment and go into dark caverns with no free surface of breathable air. While Missandei definitely feels like the glaringly obvious piece of a what-doesn’t-belong-here drawing designed for young school children, she has decided that she doesn’t have to act like it. She can _fake_ it while she tries to _make_ it.

Yara has a lot of energy. She is bouncing in her seat as she says she wants to know what the nightlife here looks like. Azzie assures her that she will find out soon enough. Grey has kind of shifted his personality. He has gone from a man who is perpetually tense that Missandei is going to smack him in the face with another revelation about herself to a man that is sweaty, relaxed, and constantly laughing underneath a million inside jokes with his brother. He is a man who constantly slaps the table and says, “Oh shit! I remember that!”

It’s actually really great to see him like this. It’s so nice that he can have so much fun without her just dragging him the _fuck down_ with all of her annoying mental _shit._

After dinner, Azzie suggests they go check out this one place, this pool hall, on the other side of town for drinks. He tells them that it’s an island speciality — this tuber-based liquor. Yara eagerly says she’s so down. Obara is like, cool with it. And Missy is like, yay, _okay!_ — as she fights to stay upright. Sometimes she inexplicably finds it real hard to not be a soul-crushing fun-killer. When she and her brothers were kids, they used to kind of beat on her because she always got sick and prevented them from doing fun stuff because their dad didn’t want her to feel left out. So everyone had to stay inside and play gentle games, like jigsaw puzzles. Moss and Mars used to lightly hit her and smack her around in frustration when their parents weren’t looking because she was such a little nerf.

And then she hears Grey reluctantly say, “Ah, let’s just play it low-key tonight. I’m kind of tired.” And she feels just _massively_ guilty over it.

“But I told Zaq and the rest of ‘em — I told him ‘em you’d be coming through tonight. Auntie Dee is coming out, too. Everyone has been losing their shit ‘cause they wanna see you.”

“Well, call ‘em and tell them I can see them tomorrow —”

“I can’t tell Aunt Dee to go the fuck home,” Azzie says. “That’s Dad’s oldest sister. Dad’s going to find a way to beat your ass across an entire ocean —”

This is when she reaches out to take Grey’s hand, to get his attention. She leans into him, shyly pressing her cheek into his shoulder as everyone else watches her. She quietly says to him, “It’s okay. Everyone’s come out to see you. We should stop by.”

He says, “No, we don’t have to —”

“I’m totally fine,” she says, giving him the best smile she can.

He is not at all convinced. Like, he thinks her smile looks crazy. He says, “Miss,” really doubtfully.

“Come on, man,” Yara says, butting in. “She says she’s down. You don’t have to treat her like she’s an invalid. Missy says she wants to go meet your people. _Listen_ to her.”

 _“Yara,”_ he says, annoyed that she is trying to manipulate him for her own agenda. “I _got_ this.”

When he turns his attention back to Missandei, she is looking up at him with her really, really sleepy eyes, and he just feels like utter garbage. He knows what it feels like to be on anti-anxiety meds. He knows that to everyone else, it probably seems like a really great idea to take her into a new social situation, in a strange new place, in a tightly packed room — full of people she doesn't know. Like, this must sound so fucking _smart_ to people who don’t suffer from anxiety.

She softly tells him that she really does want to go meet his extended family and stuff. She tells him it’ll be really nice. She tells him it’ll be okay. She tells him she _really, really_ wants to go.

He thinks it is completely some heartbreaking shit.

He pulls her in close, holding her body against his in tight hug. He kisses her forehead because he is sure he will infect her mouth with gluten if he kisses her there. He tells her that they’ll just stop by for only half an hour. And then they’ll leave. He says this because he is being optimistic and hopeful. She knows that he doesn’t even know what he is talking about. She tells herself that everything be fine, regardless of what happens.

 

 

  
It takes longer than half an hour. About three hours longer. Those three and a half hours are a total nightmare for Grey because he’s scared she is in distress. Those three hours are a grind for Missandei, because she generally wants to curl up into a ball and cry a little bit — but instead, she just sits in one place and lets people come to her. She’s not doing any advanced stuff like standing and walking.

The room is really dark, red, hazy, and really hot because there’s no air-conditioning. So it is great for her very light agoraphobia. She spends a lot of the time holding a glass of water in her lap and making small talk with his aunt, who is surprisingly tall and rail-thin, who looks like she can still break Missandei in half, who tells Missandei that she is so pretty and her Summer Tongue is just so impressive. Missy is sure that this woman is just super nice because Missy’s a real dud. She just smiles and forces herself to laugh so that his aunt doesn’t think she is unfriendly. She asks questions about the climate and also makes stunning observations like, “It is really hot here.”

Grey is pretty pissed by the time people finally get a fucking clue and tell him that they should go home and rest — because they just had a full day of travel so they must be tired. He wants to snap in his cousin Zaq’s face and be like, _no shit, asshole,_ even though Zaq has been nice as hell to him all night, getting him drinks and snacks, eagerly re-introducing him to everyone.

Grey is even mad at Azzie and Yara. Obara is okay. Obara hasn’t really done anything to piss him off.

He ends up climbing into the backseat with Missandei when it’s time to go. He ends up touching her forehead, her cheeks, her shoulders, and her hips, to see where she’s at. She whispers to him that she’s okay. Missandei ends up falling asleep against him, once she’s away from noise and people, in the quiet lull of the car.

He doesn’t really say goodnight to Yara and Obara when they exit the truck — because _fuck Yara._

When they get back to the house, he picks her up, carries her, and deposits her on Azzie’s couch for a little bit — because he remembers that he left the sheets to their bed hanging out on the line. He jacks a banana from Azzie’s kitchen and he looms over her, lightly slapping her face awake. He puts the banana in her hand, with the top of the peel ripped off. He tells her to try and eat that while he makes their bed. She barely ate anything at dinner, and it took him way too long to realize that she is purposely stopping herself from eating because she didn’t want to ruin his fucking fun-ass time by getting ill. She is just constantly just _killing_ him with this _shit._

In the bedroom, Azzie stands in the doorway and asks Grey if she is okay.

And he snaps. He says, “No, fuckturd. She’s _not okay.”_

Azzie slowly shakes his head. He’s holding another beer. He is completely unfazed by his little brother’s pissy attitude — because it is Grey. He just blankly observes that his little brother is like, really _really nuts_ about Missandei — like, all in love and stuff. “And it is super adorable.”

“Shut up,” Grey mutters. And then he says, “Can you work on that corner?” referring to the fitted sheet.

She’s sleeping and only half of her banana was eaten when he gets back to her. She is protectively clutching the thing tightly against her chest. He has to pry it out of her hand, wrap it up in a napkin, and leave it on a plate underneath a mesh basket, before he picks her back up and walks her into the bedroom. He tells Azzie goodnight, and then he shuts the door.

He tries to shake her awake to ask her how she wants to sleep — and he means if she wants to change into her pajamas, do something with her hair, brush her teeth — all of that stuff. But she just sleepily murmurs that she just wants to sleep with him.

He’s like, _okay,_ as he pulls her sandals off her dusty feet, struggling with the tiny little buckles in the dim light of the room. He lines her shoes up next to her suitcase on the floor. He quietly says, “Sorry, babe,” as rolls her over onto her side and reaches under her shirt to unclip her underwire bra. He extracts the bra from underneath her t-shirt, taking the straps down her arms, pulling the bra out of her collar, being careful not to look at anything or touch anything. He realizes that he’s being a real hypocrite right now — undressing an unconscious woman, except he’s not deriving any pleasure out of this, and she’ll probably be annoyed if she wakes up and her bra is all bent from being slept on. He says sorry to her again, as he unbuttons and unzips her jeans and then struggles with pulling them off her legs because her pants are a little tight and she’s damp with sweat.

After that, he shoves her entire body underneath the clean blanket and sheets, dirty feet and all. He quickly strips down to his boxers, leaving his shirt on. He quickly brushes and rinses his entire fucking mouth — _twice_ — and then splashes water on his face. When he crawls into bed next to her, he tells himself, _whatever,_ as he pulls her body into his.

 

 

 

 


	39. Everyone goes to the beach!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On vacation with a bunch of exhibitionists, Missy starts coming to terms with the fact that she will eventually have sex with the future love of her life. Grey generally brings his sexiest self forward, by being really moody and standoffish around the future love of his life. Azzie showcases several of his talents!

 

 

When she wakes up, she discovers many things. First, she’s not wearing pants. Second, she’s not wearing a bra. Third, her hair feels like a tangled, lopsided mess. Fourth, she smells a little like body odor and stale cigarette smoke. Fifth, she feels pretty good! Her head is clear and her body feels pretty energized and well-rested! Also, sixth OMG, his warm and heavy hand is resting on her stomach like they are in a relationship! He’s still snoozing, and he looks really cute!  
  
She lifts up the blanket from both of their bodies, so she can get a quick peek at what’s going on down there. She finds that they are both wearing underwear, and they both have shirts on. Okay, good to know.

She presses her lips to his warm cheek before she gingerly gets up, trying not to wake him up. She finds a pile of their dirty clothes on the floor next to the door — her jeans, her bra, his shorts, his socks — co-mingling. And it is _so cool._

After digging messily around in her suitcase for clean clothes and toiletries, she peeks her head out of the bedroom door and sees that the house is brightly lit by sunshine, utterly quiet and still. The view into Azzie’s bedroom is wide open — because it’s not a real bedroom. Through the sliding glass doors and windows, she can see that Grey’s brother is still sleeping

She silently runs to the bathroom anyway, nervous about getting caught like . . . being a house guest. After looking in drawers and underneath the sink, she can’t really find fresh towels easily — so she kind of just bites the bullet and grab the maroon towel that is hanging on a hook. It smells . . . okay.

During her quick and hysterically cold shower — she can’t figure out how to turn the hot water on because there are two knobby things that are doing nothing when she turns them — her eyes look at _everything._ They look at the rust stains on the bottom of the tub, the mildew stains in the joints, the soap scum all over the sides and walls, and the molding shower curtain — granted this is an old house, but Azzie is definitely a bit of a slob, which is completely opposite of Grey’s style. And she doesn’t really think she’s a snob, but this bathroom and her naked body in it is just bringing out the hypochondriac in her.

After quickly washing her hair and hopping out, she ends up squeezing the water out over the sink. And then she actually uses the t-shirt she slept in to wick out more water out of her hair. She’s dripping wet all over the floor and already pre-emptively embarrassed.

She ends up getting on her hands and knees to wipe up the drips with the maroon towel. And she generally tries not to go _whoa_ and internally scream too much when she spies just a lot of pubic hair on the ground.

She jumps into her clean clothes and brushes her teeth fast so she can get out of the bathroom already. She’s damp all over.

She realizes she is starving. She doesn’t look under the mesh basket to find her banana from the night before. Instead, she hems and haws and looks longingly at the innocuous bunch of bananas on the kitchen counter. She doesn’t want to take Azzie’s food without asking.

It takes her a lot of effort and self-motivation to pluck a whole banana from the bunch. She’s quietly peeling it as she walks back to the guest bedroom.

He is awake and sitting up in bed — his legs still underneath the covers. She manages to be startled, even though he has not made one single sound. She stops chewing her banana mid-bite. She freezes.

He says, “We need to talk,” all seriously and sternly.

And she just shrinks down to almost nothing inside. She says, “We do?”

He pats the empty space next to him. She drops the damp maroon towel and her clothes into the pile on the ground, and she gingerly gets on the bed and scoots her way up to him, with her banana clutched in one hand.

She thinks she’s about to get a lecture, or she’s about to be told that she did something completely terrible the other night. She’s afraid he’s about to tell her that everyone in his family found her standoffish and cold because she didn’t really engage with anyone super well last night. She worries that she is already making his vacation not fun — that both of their fears are coming to life right now. She’s a dork who can’t bring herself to come to him at one-hundred. She’s a little weirdo that needs to be babysat because she’s a child and not an adult woman.

Then he gently says, “Keep eating your banana.”

“Oh!” she says, looking down at her hand. She actually completely forgot it was there. She quickly unpeels the rest of the banana and shoves half of the thing in her mouth.

This makes him laugh quietly as he takes the peel from her, leaving one last little nub in her hand, which she offers to him. He smiles and he takes it from her, popping it into his mouth. He actually just ends up holding the peel as he quietly chews because there’s no trash can nearby.

He’s not very practiced at this kind of thing — at this kind of conversation — so his voice is hesitant and halting, as he says, “How did you sleep?” He’s trying to ease into it.

She smiles softly at him. Her mouth is still full. She nods and says, “Good,” flashing him a bit of masticated banana.

He laughs a little bit again — nervously. “You showered,” he says, now opting to just point out really obvious things.

She nods kindly again, now trying to swallow as much as she can without gagging on it.

“I’m sorry we’re not like, in a hotel,” he says. “I know my brother is disgusting. I was planning on cleaning the bathroom before you got to it.”

She swallows the rest of the banana. Then she softly says, “It’s okay. I like it here. I like your brother a lot.”

“That’s good,” he says. He looks down at his hands.

“What’s up, Grey?” she says, ducking her face to look at him. Her hand goes up to cup his cheek. “What are you thinking about?”

He ends up breaking up his thoughts and letting them come out in pieces and fragments because he can’t get them cohesive enough to come out in a sensical narrative. He tells her his emotions from yesterday — he was frustrated, nervous, angry at himself, angry at everyone around them, angry at her a little bit even though it’s unfair to be angry at her. He tells her she’s too self-sacrificing sometimes. He tells her that he already knows he’s too judgemental and rigid. He tells her he wishes she would’ve just called it quits and asked to go home early to rest. He tells her that he hates himself for not saying it himself, but he was nervous about speaking for her — especially after what Yara said. He is scared of getting locked into a dynamic where he tells her how she feels and how she thinks. But it was just killer to watch her just barely getting through it. Part of his empathy is self-centered. He thinks that it bothers him to watch her struggle because it reminds him of what it used to feel like when he struggled. He hates being reminded of that. He tells her he’s sorry. He says, “I’m sorry for how it all went down. I should’ve talked to Azzie beforehand and told him that we didn’t want to do anything the first day. I should’ve anticipated. I should’ve like, known this was going to happen —”

“It’s okay,” she interrupts, leaning on an arm brace against the mattress, in between his knees. “It wasn’t a big deal. I mean, I feel pretty good today.”

“Well, I feel bad about it.”

“Don’t,” she says. “And you’re not responsible for me. I’m responsible for me. And I really decided to like, meet your family as a Xanax-zombie.” She’s teasing. She’s swaying and leaning toward him a little bit. She’s wondering when the talking portion of this conversation is going to be over so they can get to the kissing part of it.

He’s not really understanding this, because she is being really subtle about it. He’s mostly just regretting a lot of the things he said to her when they first started dating. Stuff about how he hates weakness and how weak people should just get the fuck out of his face because unless they got their genitals ripped off, then he just doesn’t want to hear it. Stuff about how his parents raised him right, so he doesn’t ever dick off on responsibilities. Stuff about how discipline and an ability to withstand discomfort and pain is basically godliness. He might be fucking insane. He might have given her a complex with all of this stuff. Because he had to watch this wonderful fucking person put herself through the wringer because she didn’t want to disappoint him.

She never gets her kiss. He is in a mood, and she can’t really do or say much to like, correct his attitude so that it’s focused on like, making out with her in bed. He just sits there despondently with her banana peel in his hands, just internalizing a lot. She actually has to leave the room at some point because she can hear Azzie moving around — and she is really hungry.

 

 

  
Outside of the room, Azzie is not wearing very much clothing. He is shirtless and pantless. He is only wearing boxers, so that is just great because she’s _super cool_ with the people around her being casually undressed. He is super fit. It is gross how _comfortable_ it makes her feel — how fit he is. When he spots her, he smiles grandly and asks her if Grey is still sleeping. She keeps her eyes on his face and tells Azzie that Grey is kind of brooding?

Azzie rolls his eyes at that. And she actually _loves this._ Like for real. She exchanges a look with Grey’s brother — keeping it silent just in case Grey has supersonic hearing. She’s trying to make her eyes go: _I know, right? He is so dramatic sometimes._

She is pretty sure Azzie’s expression is saying: _Fuck yes, I know. He listens to a lot of Drake._

Azzie has her sit down on a really high chair as he tells her that he’s going to make her any kind of breakfast she wants — as long as it consists of fish, eggs, rice, and vegetables. He ends up making a stir-fry that is mostly egg and fish — like a rice omelette. He gives her a cup of coffee and apologizes for not having a milk substitute ready for her. He can’t even give her sugar because he’s sure that he’s tainted his sugar with fistfuls of flour from baking. She tells him it’s totally fine. She can drink black coffee.

He is already drinking a beer even though it’s the crack of morning. He keeps joking around and pretending like he’s going to pour his beer into the pan and ruin her breakfast right in front of her face. She keeps squishing down her laughter because being transparently amused sometimes makes her feel embarrassed. Plus, she’s completely not over the fact that he’s not wearing a shirt. She keeps wondering — off and on — if this is how Grey would have turned out, if Grey didn’t suffer his accident. Maybe if Grey still had his penis, he would be goofier and constantly walk around in a state of undress. She is pretty sure that a goofier, more body-confident Grey who never went through anxiety attacks and depression would not be as interested in dating her or as understanding of her shit though.

Like, Grey, Azzie is really capable in the kitchen. She trusts him not to accidentally poison her based on how fast and accurately he flattens and minces garlic.

As he slides half of her _monster-sized_ rice-fish-omelette onto her plate, saving the other half for himself and Grey — as he’s popping bread into the toaster and waits for it crisp up, he says, “So, you’re Mossy’s little sis.”

Her face falls. Because she completely forgot Azzie is apparently good friends with her brother. She says, “Yes,” reluctantly. “What has he said about me?”

“Oh, lots of things,” Azzie says vaguely, grinning as he takes another sip from his beer. And then more seriously, he says, “You’re actually a lot different from what I pictured. I pictured someone much younger and much more helpless. I also pictured someone prissier. Someone without any street smarts at all. Also didn’t expect for you to be so hot, either.” Azzie laughs. “I thought you’d be like — awkwardly homely?”

She’s blushing. Because he said something kind of nice and blunt about how she looks.

And then Azzie says, “I heard he got shot.”

Which brings their conversation down really swiftly. She starts breaking up her omelette into pieces, popping little fluffy egg pillows into her mouth — she makes a sound because it’s _so good_ — and then she tells Azzie that yes, Moss got shot. And it was predictably terrifying and emotional and they all questioned his and Mars’ line of work and whether it is worth it.

Azzie tells her that when he heard Moss was shot, he immediately thought it was something racial. She shrugs. She says maybe it was. Maybe that’s why he was shot when he opened the door. It’s hard to know.

He asks her if charges were filed — against anyone. She says thankfully no. It was kind of embarrassing for the department, because the incident got written up in the press — with Moss and his partner’s name in print and everything. Like, that’s the first thing that comes up now, when Moss’ name gets Googled. But that’s not the worst thing in the world at all. He doesn’t have much of an online presence anyway. It’s just a little odd.

Their conversation gets interrupted when Grey walks out silently, throws the banana peel in the trash, and starts heading to the bathroom, at which point, Azzie says, “Stop! Don’t shower yet!”

 

 

  
She ends up overeating to make up for undereating yesterday, with her plate balanced on her knees as Azzie makes Grey take off his shirt — which is great because she’s _super chill_ with two really good-looking men just casually hanging out shirtless around her — she’s super fine watching the guy she’s going to be _having sex with_ in the future just flashing his nipples at her. They are symmetrical and brown and look like man nipples.

She generally tries not to look like she’s gawking at his body by doing the very opposite, as Azzie makes Grey sit in a chair on the porch. She’s looking up at the sky, intently at her plate of food, on the weathered floorboards of the porch, at her fork, just everywhere except at him. It makes Azzie laugh. He kindly says, “Really lovin’ the energy here.” Then he matter-of-factly says, “You guys have definitely not slept together yet.”

She releases this groan. Of mortification.

Azzie has moved on. He has clippers plugged into an outlet and he’s palming the top of his brother’s head. He tells her that Grey’s fucking hair has been driving him insane since he first laid eyes on Grey. Azzie tells her he’s going to do her a favor and make Grey cute for her, because it is _insane_ the few shits his baby bro gives about his appearance.

She says, “I already think he’s cute,” at the same Grey says, “I _care._ Kind of.”

They immediately make eye contact. And then they immediately look away at the same time.

Grey is eating toast with butter — he has already scarfed down his portion of omelette, but he still wants to poison his mouth really comprehensively — as Azzie buzzes the back of his brother’s head and mutters that he’s going to try and do a very nice, very subtle fade. Azzie tells her that he used to cut Grey’s hair all the time when they were growing up. Because Grey didn’t care that their mom took him to like, the barber next to the mall because she had a coupon — but Azzie _cared._

“I’m just never cool-looking enough for him,” Grey says in a deadpan, shoving the rest of the toast into his mouth. “The way I look embarrasses him. He doesn’t like being seen in public with me. I wish he would just accept me for me.”

 _“Shut up,”_ Azzie says, turning off the clippers so that he can adjust the blades.

“He doesn’t think I’m Black enough. He thinks I’m a hipster douchebag.”

“This is true,” Azzie mutters, turning the clippers on again.

“I mean, I haven’t even told you that I started brewing beer with Dad. We have like, binders full of notes. And I make really kickass kombucha now.”

“He really _does!”_ she says eagerly.

 

 

  
After his haircut, Grey has to clean it up. He runs to grab a broom and a plastic bag then has a short argument with Azzie, who thinks that Grey should just sweep the hair off the porch and be done with it. Grey says that _that’s crazy,_ as he sweeps the bits of hair into the plastic bag, which he deposits into the garbage can.

He hops into the shower after that — but then shortly screams out Azzie’s name because he cannot figure out how to get the faucet to go hot, either. Azzie is like, oh shit! Because he forgot to tell them that there’s a trick with the faucet. It has to be pulled _out._ He goes into the bathroom to show Grey, and she’s left by herself in the living room, just awkwardly wondering how close Grey and Azzie are. Is it like, very? Or is it very, _very?_

They are headed to the beach after they pick up Yara and Obara. Azzie learned an important lesson the other night — that it’s important to mix chill time with activity time or else his little bro will go _ballistic._

Azzie changes for the beach by just swapping out his boxers for swim trucks. His bedroom affords him no privacy, so he just pulls down his boxers without any _fucks_ behind glass. She is like oh my _God,_ as she turns around to give him the privacy he is obviously craving. When he appears in front of her again, broadly smiling all friendly, she sees that this guy still insists on not wearing a shirt. She’s starting to get used to it. He tells her he’s going to go outside to load a few boards into the back of his truck. He tells her not to worry, he has paddle boards, too. She is like, oh great, she going to have to get on a paddle board now. She is simultaneously flattered and terrified of the assumptions that Azzie keeps making about her. Azzie keeps assuming she’s cooler than she actually is. He keeps assuming she’s more athletic than she actually is.

In the bedroom, she changes into her swimsuit in a rush, throwing on clothes over her two-piece. She reminds herself that Grey’s already seen her naked, so she’s being a little bit ridiculous — but it was dark and he was also trying not to look at her when she got naked in front of him. This is different. This is during day time. And it is really bright outside. Yeah, they are probably not ready to have sex together yet.

Grey knocks on the door after he gets out of the shower. She tells him it’s okay to come in. He’s dressed in clothes — like a normal person — when he walks in. He cannot look her in the face even though she, too, is dressed in clothes like a normal person. He mutters that he came in to gather up the pile of dirty laundry that they have accumulated. He tells her that he’s going to do a load. He asks her if there’s anything else she wants to throw in there.

She pretty much almost stops him from doing laundry — because her underwear — her panties — are in that pile and she is already mortified at the thought of him coming across her underwear and washing it for her.

This is another reason they are _definitely_ not ready to have sex with each other. She’s still underwear-shy.

She needs to get over this though. She lets him leave with an armful of their dirty clothes without comment.

 

 

  
When they pick up Yara and Obara, Yara tells them that she and Obara ate hotel breakfast. It was like, an entire buffet of quiche, trays of bacon, pancakes, oatmeal, and eggs. She asks Missandei how she is feeling. She also asks Grey if he is still pissed at her.

He seems like he want to protest this — but after a pause, he just says, “No. I’m over it.”

“That’s good,” Yara says, reaching up to give him a quick chest rub. “I hate it when we fight.”

“You guys had a fight?” Missandei says, trying to joke around. “And I missed it?”

“It was very low-key,” Yara says, just blatantly being truthful — in a way that just makes everyone slightly tense up. “He just started ignoring me and he refused to say goodnight to me or hug me when we said bye yesterday. It kind of bummed me out.”  
  
“It really did,” Obara confirms. “I know it did because she like, talked about it with me. And I was like, whaaat? You’re sharing . . . how you feel? Whaaat?”

And to disperse some of the tension, Missandei randomly just decides to reach over and start lightly slapping Yara’s face repeatedly. Yara looks _shocked._ Her fists go up. And Missy is like, oh my God, afraid Yara is going to punch her. Missy quickly says, “You — you better not ruin my vacation by getting in a fight with Grey.”

Which makes Yara lower her fists — as she laughs — because she remembers where that’s from. She says, “Okay, okay, touche. Good job. You got me. My bad.”

 

 

  
When they get to the beach, she puts her sunglasses on, brushes itchy strands of her hair off her face that got pushed there by the wind, and she looks at the horizon, the sepia-toned white sand — and she feels kind of nostalgic. Because it reminds her of Naath.

Yara immediately takes off her clothes, right there next to the truck. Her eagerness makes Azzie laugh a little bit. She grins and then helps him lift out the boards from the back. Obara follows suit — and then Grey, albeit a little reluctantly. He mutely pulls off his shirt and recalls that this kind of thing used to be easier before being with her made him just incredibly self-conscious all the time.

Everyone is in swimwear except for her — and it makes her feel really put on the spot. She wonders where Dany is. Because Dany is really handy in these moments, putting herself in front of the bullet to distract everyone from Missandei’s body consciousness.

Missy takes off her clothes silently and tosses her shirt and shorts into the backseat of the truck, along with everyone else’s clothes. She tells herself that it would be weird to be modest around these exhibitionists. She tells herself it could be worse — they could be a nude beach like how Yara wants. She asks herself what is the worst that can happen to her. She decides that it’s being catcalled in front of Grey and then getting embarrassed and awkward about it. That’s not too terrible.

So she generally follows everyone as they carry stuff to the beach. She’s holding towels. Grey has a surfboard under his arm and a cooler full of beer in his hand. She generally just stares at the bunched muscles on his naked back through her glasses and just pretty much starts sweating under the hot sun because she knows she’s eventually going to be having sex with that person.

She bows out of water activities. Because she is pretty sure she’s going to drown because she’s currently really anxious. She knows she’ll be too stressed out and scared to actually like, enjoy herself or remember to swim. She doesn’t want to force it. She knows she’s not cool like they all are. They know she’s not cool like they all are. She assures them that she’ll be fine watching their cooler of poison water, baking in the sun, and getting darker.

“I can hang out with you for a bit?” Grey offers.

“No,” she says, staring out at the ocean. “Don’t worry about me. Just go.”

“Are you sure?” he says doubtfully.

“Yes!” she says, smiling at him. “Go! Have fun! Go get thrashed around by walls of water like that’s a totally normal and not-terrifying thing to do.”

“Are you _sure?”_ he repeats.

“Oh my God, yes!”

“Grey,” Yara cuts in. “She said she’s fine. Come on, man.”

 

 

 


	40. Grey is hot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei tries to be cool with being everyone's favorite fifth wheel. The future love of her life gets his head on straight after getting some exercise. Yara and Grey make up. Yummy and not so yummy food gets eaten. And then it's nap time for everybody!

 

 

  
Honestly, a lot of his mental shit just melts away once he gets into the water. He kind of releases this tension once his body gets submerged and the salt holds him up. He looks at Azzie, Yara, and Obara — and his face is telling them sorry, but he’s abandoning them now. His brother smiles at him — holding up an arm and waving him off. Being from cold water, Yara has never surfed before. Obara has some experience, but not extensive. So Azzie is going to give them a lesson.

Grey swims out with his board, far enough that he can no longer easily see Missandei on the beach, so he turns to look at the horizon. He’s remembering family trips to the Isles during summer break, when they were all younger. He remembers his dad and mom calling after them to slow down as they ran into the water. He remembers his dad teaching him how to surf, and how his dad was once the strongest guy Grey knew — physically. His dad is still the strongest guy he knows, in other ways.

And he also remembers a period where he just trudged through family vacation by lying on the beach, not going into the water at all because because he was depressed and he didn’t want to get salt into his wound.

He paddles out to the swells. What he loves about this is that it’s a sensory overload — the roar of being encased in a wall of water, the colors and the the light, the taste of salt, the thrumming adrenaline choking up his throat. He also likes that this activity requires his reflexes to be sharp as hell, to absorb and manipulate random drops and surges in speed. He also loves making mistakes that result in a wave driving him down the dark, colder depths of the ocean with terrifying speed and power. He loves the risk of it all. He loves the great disparity in feeling — how he alternates between moments of feeling legitimately scared that it might be the end of him to the heady moments when he feels like he’s standing on the very top of human ability and existence — like he really can’t do better than where he is currently at. There is nowhere else to go except where he is currently at.

He loses sense of time out there — until he sees his brother paddling out to him. Yara and Obara have been left alone to contend with smaller waves.

Azzie appreciatively says, _“Bro.”_

Grey says, “I know.”

 

 

  
His mood is amazing after that. He selfishly loses two hours out there with Azzie — and they only go in when they both realize that they are _starving._ They are so hungry that that’s the only thing they talk about as they paddle and swim in. Azzie is telling him that he could eat an entire fried fish. Grey is telling Azzie he can eat a stack of corn cakes. Azzie is telling Grey he can eat that chicken thing with the green sauce. Grey is telling Azzie that he kind of misses the sweet potatoes cooked over charcoal sometimes. Like, he misses the simplicity and the memory of their mom forcing that down their throats. Azzie tells Grey that he could also eat a burger. Grey is like, “Oh shit, I could totally go for a fucking cheeseburger right now, oh my God.”

They are dripping wet when they walk up to the ladies. Yara hands him an freshly opened, cold bottle of beer and says, “Guys! You are so _amazing_ —”

And Grey interrupts her predictable compliments by saying, “Do you wanna go eat?” before he starts guzzling. And _God,_ it’s just a crap lager but it tastes _so good._

She says, “Oh my God, _yes.”_

“Alright, let’s do it,” Azzie says, before tilting his bottle back, too.

Grey blindly reaches out for Missandei as he decides that he’s just going to shotgun this beer so that they can just go eat _already._ He grabs her by the hip — and in contrast to him, she is very warm-verging-on-hot because she’s been baking all morning.

She awkwardly says, “You’re all wet,” as he pulls her in for a hug. His body is still coming down from the adrenaline rush, and he is just blissed out. He just thinks her body looks real fucking awesome in a swimsuit — just really, really fucking _good_ — and he’s thinking that he could really use a crapton of calories right now — and also sex.

After he finishes his beer, he pulls her in tighter, with his hand guiding from the small of her back. He kisses her on her shoulder and her cheek. He quietly whispers into her ear and tells her, “You’re warm.”

She is _squirming._ She’s embarrassed that they are standing in front of their friends right now. She’s embarrassed that she’s basically nakedly pressed up against him. She’s also a little bewildered over what seems like a crazy one-eighty shift in his mood.

So he lets her go. He smiles at her adorable self-consciousness. He actually laughs at it — but he doesn’t say anything else. He just suppresses a burp and then hands his empty bottle over to Yara, who puts it into a plastic bag with the other empty bottles. She tells him that they have to replenish their supply. He tells her they can stop at a store at some point.

Yara is also currently sweet on him — just fucking tired of fighting with him over the dumbest shit. She reaches out a hand to him, which he takes. Their hands are connected as he curls his arm around her shoulders as she starts to drag him back to the truck. They have to let each other go when maneuvering gets difficult, the both of them weighed down by boards, bags, towels, and the cooler. Yara ends the connection by reaching out to casually pat him on his wet butt.

Missandei follows behind them. Watching this shit. She makes a mental note to not throw this into Grey’s face later when she gets emotional. He does not like it when she does that. But she just _loves_ that she is like, the fifth wheel here because she’s such a freaking dingus.

 

 

  
At lunch — at a fish house — they all talk about their amazing feats of athleticism and just how amazing the water was out there. As she ties her hair up, Yara gushes at Grey and says he was totally right, that there is some special quality out here that makes everything kind of magical. She laughs at herself in reflex and touches her sunburnt nose, because she sounds so uncharacteristically sentimental.

Grey says, _“Right?”_ as he laughs along with her, as he leans back in his chair and swivels his head to look into the kitchen, eager to eat.

Missandei keeps watching him — she keeps watching his transparent happiness, and she feels a bunch of regret. She really regrets shrinking away from him when he hugged her because that was really sweet and adorable, and she kind of ruined it. He has been very courteous and polite with her ever since. He has been giving her a lot of space ever since — and there’s no smooth way for her to let him know that she made a mistake, that she didn’t mean to shy away from the public cuddles. She would like more of that actually, please.

He is sitting on the other side of the table. He is facing her.

When a bunch of seafood comes, Azzie starts telling them how they should eat it. He tells them to actually pull off the skin because it was cooked in salt and eating the skin will be waaay salty. Obara tests this and confirms that it is waaay salty.

“Put this on there,” Grey says to Missandei, reaching over to throw a bunch of sauces and seasonings on her fish, before he picks up her food and tightly wraps it up in a small lettuce leaf bundle. He hands it over to her, with his elbows on the table and his brows furrowed in concentration.

She is basically _dying_ over this. Because it’s so cute. He’s so _cute._ She takes the fish bundle and shoves it into her mouth eagerly. She stares at his glowing face. She tells him it is so good.

Which makes him happy. He hates that she didn’t eat the other day. He also has been worried about what she can and cannot eat. He has been scared that she will have to eat bananas the entire time she is here with him.

Azzie decides to FaceTime their parents while they are eating. They are a few hours ahead, but he knows his parents are definitely awake and probably doing nothing besides sitting and waiting with bated breath for updates on their favorite child. When their mom answers, she is seriously like, “Hey, baby! Where is your brother? How is he doing?”

This makes Azzie crack up. His feelings aren’t hurt. Azzie flips his phone camera around and puts it into his Grey’s face. Grey’s mouth is full of fish and veggies. He waves a little bit and says, “Hi, Mom.”

She is like, “What are you eating?”

And then they have to explain to her what they are eating. When they do, she starts backseat driving their meal, telling them to remember to ask for more lettuce because sometimes restaurants are stingy with the vegetables. She tells them there has to be a good balance between proteins and the greens. She asks them if the sauce is sweet enough or too sweet. She also tells them to remember to add the chilis themselves, for the heat.

“Mom, chill,” Grey simply says, in response to _all of that._ He shoves another lettuce bundle into his mouth. “We’ve got this.”

They force the rest of the table to say hello to their mom. Azzie has to hold his phone in front of Missandei’s face for an awkwardly long time, eating with just one hand, as Missy has a very polite conversation with their mom about what she thinks about the Summer Isles so far, what she’s been eating, how she feels in general, if she’s been getting enough sleep, if Grey has been a total hag to her or what.

Missandei shyly says that everything has been great. The Isles remind her of home, actually — a lot. There are a lot of similarities. She says the food has been great. She’s been eating okay — Grey flashes her an amused look at that, because she is completely lying — and she tells his mom that Grey has been very nice to her, actually.

Then the phone gets turned back to Azzie, who asks where their dad is. Their mom says that their dad is actually right next to her. He’s been listening in. Their mom talks off-screen and asks their dad if he wants to talk to them. They can hear their dad say that he has nothing important to talk to them about. He knows what the Isles look like. He knows what they are eating. It is all just riveting shit.

“I love you too, Dad,” Azzie says.

“Love you, son," their dad says, still off-screen. "Your brother better not come home in a casket or else I’m going to fucking _kill you.”_

“That escalated quickly,” Obara observes blankly, as Azzie cuts the connection.

 

 

  
After the fish place, they ask the ladies if they are good or if they are still hungry. Yara raises a brow and answers for all of them. She says they are stuffed. Azzie is like, oh great. And then he looks at his brother and grins, before he asks them if they would mind just a quick stopover at a burger stand.

Obara says, “Oh my God, you are still hungry.”

The burger stand is just this homemade building in the middle of the parking lot of a bank — of all things. Grey tells them that it’s actually a _really_ shitty burger. The burgers on the Isles are pretty shit because cow meat is expensive because the nice stuff has to generally be imported in. The quality of domestic cows isn’t really awesome. Plus, burgers are a Western import, so to their palate, it would taste kind of weird. Like, it’s oddly seasoned, a little sweet, cheesy, onion-y, and _sour?_ From the back seat, he says, “It’s a gross burger, but oh my God, I love it. I yearn for it sometimes. I have dirty dreams about it sometimes.”

“Man, I want to try it,” Yara says.

“Me too,” Obara says.

“You can have a bite of mine,” he tells them, rolling down his dust-covered window so that he can read the menu — it’s just smoke and mirrors. He already knows what he’s going to get. “It’s completely not worth you getting your own.” And then he squeals — in a manly way — as he reaches up with both hands and squeezes his brother’s shoulders. He sweetly says, “Thank you, Azzie! Thanks for driving us around and hanging out with us!”

“Are you kidding?” Azzie asks. “I love you.”

Missandei gets left out again. She can’t taste anything without risk of cross-contamination. She just smiles politely as Grey unwraps his fat burger, takes a huge bite, smothers a groan of excitement — and then reaches across Missandei to hand the bundle to Yara, who says, “Oh my God, there’s a pork cutlet in this.”

Grey cracks up. He had forgotten to tell them that. He says, “Oh yeah!”

Yara takes a bite, before handing the bundle to Obara in the front passenger seat. Yara chews thoughtfully before she declares that it’s different — she’s not sure she’d call it a burger. It’s a good sandwich, but it is a bit of a weird burger.

Grey is nonplussed by the criticism. He has to reach over Missandei again, when he gets his burger back. His arm skims the tip of her nose a little bit, which makes him say, “Sorry,” as he bites into it again.

He has this mix of ketchup and mayo on the corner of his mouth. She reaches out to gently wipe it off his face and then she kind of freezes, with the dollop of peachy pink on her thumb. She realizes she can’t lick it off herself and Azzie has the paper bag full of napkins.

She opens her eyes a little bit wider — so she looks alert and nonthreatening, as she offers her hand to him. No one is watching them as he maintains just a shit-ton of eye contact and closes his mouth over her thumb. It is wet in his mouth. And warm. And hot. And she feel the light scrape of his teeth before the tip of his tongue lands her skin and licks off the sauce.

Her heart is just _pounding_ as her hand drops from his mouth. He’s starting to smile at her a little bit as her face actually drops into a very soft, very benign glare. She is thinking that she cannot believe this shit. She is maintaining a lot of eye contact, too.

 

 

  
Grey feels like he wants to jump the fuck out of his skin, when Azzie asks them what they want to do next. He tells Azzie that he actually would like to go pull some clothes out of the washing machine and hang them up before they get stinky. Azzie is like, “Are you serious?”

Yara says, “No, that sounds good. Maybe we can take a break from each other and have some downtime? Maybe we can agree to meet up for dinner? By the way, guys, we’re just going to rent a car. It’s totally ridiculous that Azzie has to cart our asses around everywhere.”

“No, I don’t mind,” Azzie inserts.

“Ah, you’re just the best, man,” Yara says, reaching forward to clap him on the shoulder.

 

 

  
When they get back to the house, her legs are wobbly as she hops out of the truck. One side of her body is a little damp from being pressed up against Yara. The other side — the Grey side — is pretty dry.

He touches her hand a little bit to get her attention after he climbs out. Azzie is unloading the boards from the back of his truck. Grey is giving her a look. She generally answers him by squeezing his hand real quick, before she lets go and scurries over to Azzie, trying to ineffectively help him. He laughs her off and tells her that it’s fine. It’ll be quick.

Grey quickly pulls their wet clothes out the washing machine and puts it all on the clothesline as fast as humanly possible. It is sloppy and some clothing items are lying a little on top of each other. When he comes across her underwear, he sarcastically tells himself that this is so great, before he throws it over the line.

Grey catches Azzie coming out of the bathroom, as the toilet flushes behind him. Grey tilts his head to the bedroom and tells Azzie that he and Missandei are going to take a nap. Azzie has basically figured out what is going on — they want alone time — so he is like, _“Gotchaaa,”_ as he walks over the kitchen and swipes the keys up from the counter. He tells Grey that he’s gonna go and visit his lady then. He reminds Grey that he's going to come back around in a few hours to pick them all up for dinner, so that they can all finally meet. He tells Grey, “She’s really looking forward to this,” kind of nervously.

Grey softens and he slows down his heart beat a little bit. He says, “Me too. I’m looking forward to meeting her, too.”

After Azzie leaves, Grey goes off to brush his teeth and to rinse out his mouth with mouthwash a few times — probably three fucking times. His mind is screaming out. His body is also screaming out. It is screaming that it wants to fuck her. It wants to fuck her a lot. All it wants to do is _fuck her_. His mind is not much better. His mind keeps conjuring up images of her awesome naked body just instinctively trying to _fuck with him_. His toothbrush is in his frothy mouth as he groans, as he braces his arms against the sink and bends down to stretch out a little bit, because holy shit, he needs to get a handle on himself.

So he reminds himself that he is scared. If other men think about baseball or whatever stupid stereotypical masculine shit to calm their asses down, then Grey thinks about the traumatic thing that happened to him to calm his ass down. He tells himself that he’s a freak, that he’s gross, that he’s going to be bad at sex anyway, that she will recoil from him and scream in terror when he just is nakedly open and vulnerable in front of her.

So that does it. And he actually goes too far with it. Now he is actually legit freaked out all over again. Fucking _moron._

 

 

  
She is in the bedroom already. The way that they are together has to be so deliberate sometimes because of her gluten intolerance. Sometimes she doesn’t even get to be caught blindsided with affection. He can’t always just grab her spontaneously and lay a kiss on her. Sometimes — like now — she gets to be primed for affection because he has to go to a sink to clean out his entire mouth before he can do anything involving his mouth with her.

And she gets to spend that time nervously pacing the bedroom, trying to figure out where to stand, where to sit — maybe she should lie down — maybe that is just too much.

He says, “Hey,” when he walks into the room. He is smiling at her softly.

She shyly says, “Hi.”

Then he laughs self-consciously. He says, “So, no pressure to like . . . mess around with me. I didn’t mean — I kind of just got caught up in the mood from earlier — but like, as I was brushing my teeth for like, ten minutes, some of the urgency has dissipated. So now there’s just, um, you know — _this.”_ He nods. And then helpfully, he says, “We can watch TV on a computer and maybe then take a nap?”

Like how it has been before, his utter nervousness fortifies her and makes her stronger. Her heart is starting to throb inside her chest, as adrenaline starts building up and up inside of her. She is grateful for this — she is grateful that they don’t feed each other in the bad ways. She is so glad that that when he goes low, she goes high. She is glad that when she is in a really shit place mentally, he can feel it and he tries to pull her out of it. She _loves_ when he is shy and nervous around her, because that’s usually her role. She thinks there’s something authentic about it. She thinks there’s something sweet about it. She likes the way his current shyness stands in contrast to his body — or what she remembers of his body.

So she walks up to him. She grabs his face. She yanks it down and brushes her lips against his mouth. She whispers to him, “I haven’t kissed you in _forever.”_ And then she is pulling him backwards toward the bed.

He’s like, “Oh my God, _yeah,”_ as his mood and his confidence quickly shifts. He follows her to bed, just carefully watching her face for signs of fear or apprehension. He keeps seeing like, this naked want from her. And he is like, oh my _God,_ as he tucks his hands underneath her thighs and just picks her up and drops her down to the bed onto her back.

It makes heart stop because she wasn’t expecting it. She’s not breathing as he looms over her. And then he parts his lips and touches her mouth tongue first.

She almost ruins it by pulling away and screaming out what the fuck, that is so _bold!_ But now her heart is hammering in her chest, her face, her eyes, her ears — all over — and she just grabs onto his face and opens her mouth. He tastes really minty and really warm and just really _hot._

The kiss is _dirty._ It is way fucking _dirty._ This is the dirtiest kiss _ever._ His hands are still holding onto her thighs, and the kiss is all tongue and spit and groaning and stroking and sucking. She completely stops being concerned with whether or not she is good at this, as she just condenses everything, as she clenches it all up tight. She shuts her eyes tightly. She presses her knees into his hips tightly. She holds his head to hers tightly, so that he can’t go anywhere. She gets her tongue so deep inside his mouth that he groans so loudly over it. She just starts burning up. It is like they are making up for all of the lost time when she was scared to voice what she wanted and all of the lost time when he was scared of getting pushed away again.

When they finally break apart with a gasp — to gulp in big swatches of air — she runs her hands over his face, swallowing the lump in her throat over and over again.

He says, “Um, is that okay?”

She nods dumbly. Because yeah, it was _really_ okay.

 

 

 

 


	41. Missy is hot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Missy gets some physical affection from the future love of her life, she has a small little disagreement with her future brother-in-law figure. This is the energy she brings to dinner with Azzie's special lady friend.

 

 

 

She closes the distance between their mouths again, before either of them have really gotten a chance to catch their breaths. She tries to recapture the magic and see if lightning can strike twice — she sucks in a breath before she kisses him hard and sloppy, her lips moving fast and wet over his, their tongues melding together. The pleasant minty taste from the mouthwash and toothpaste is progressively fading from his mouth, replaced by the more muted taste of his spit. Losing the strong sense of taste causes her other senses to become heightened. Her mind latches on the light smell of the ocean and sand on their bodies, the light medical scent of her sunscreen, the radiant heat that is coming off of him. And then her hands start wandering. She lightly touches his shorts with her fingertips — they are actually just the barest bit damp still — and a little crinkly underneath the pads of her fingers. Her nails careful graze over his bottom — making him groan against her mouth — she feels the vibration and hears the sound of it. She whimpers as she presses her face even harder to his. The kiss loses any and all finesse. It’s getting a little frustrating — because what she wants is _more_ and how she is trying to fulfill that want is to just suck-face hard with him.

So she makes the decision to take off her shirt. Because this just needs to go _somewhere else._ She deliberately commits to it. And then she does it. She breaks the kiss again with a grunt, twisting her head — she catches his surprised, dazed eyes. She sends him up this tortured look as she struggles. She is not great at communicating right now, so he just has to watch silently as she arches her back and wriggles around underneath him, trying to pull up the hem of her shirt in a really confined space.

He’s like, “What the —” when he realizes what is happening. He lifts off of her body a little bit so that she can have an easier time taking off her shirt.

She just does it fast, without trying to be sexy about it. She does it fast so that she can’t second-think it. It becomes this decision that she does not regret, because when her shirt is off, his gaze fly from her eyes down to her body — mostly her cleavage — and his eyes just start eagerly drinking her up. He has never looked at her like this before — so openly and with so much conflict and raw neediness on his face. This is the first time that it actually connects and makes sense to her. He _really_ does actually want to have sex, _with her._

He starts to reach out to touch her — but then he stops himself. He’s hesitating. His hand hovers.

She is like, _“Move,”_ and she actually means to move that fucking hand — touch something on her body, do something to her body, just _move._

He thinks she wants him to get off of her and to stop staring at her. So he quickly stands up to his full height. She realizes her mistake immediately when the draft of his absence hits her fevered skin.

He makes the fatal mistake of looking down at her — looking messy and sexy, lying on her back on the bed. In her shorts and bikini top. The sight of her is kind of stunning him into inaction.

She sits up. He’s being so slow, so she has decided that she’s going to do this for him. She thinks that it actually wasn’t as hard as she thought it’d be, to take off her own shirt. Like, she just ripped it off. She reasons that she can do the same exact thing with his shirt. Like, she just needs to grab it, and then she needs to pull it.

That’s what she does. She grabs a fist of material at his belly button and presses it into his skin, holding it there for a moment because this is crazy — she is taking off his _fucking clothes!_ — while he is _awake!_ — and the heat and pressure of her hand on his stomach causes him to make a really sad and hot sound. It’s this grunt of like, disbelief. And she is like _oh my God, yes, more of this_ — as she starts sliding her hand up his body, pressing hard, taking his shirt up, exposing abs, exposing ribs, exposing chest — holy shit, this is happening. She is doing _this!_

She swallows the dry lump in her throat as she pops his shirt off his head, needing to reach way up high because he is not helping her at all.

She drops the shirt on the ground. And then she just stands in front of him, staring at him. She absently wonders if this is how other people get sexy with each other. Do they just take off their shirts and start staring like complete idiots at one another? She looks at his proportions — they are great. She assesses the symmetry of him — that is great, too. He has a nice set of collarbones. He obviously works out. She knows this from the look of his body and also because sometimes he doesn’t spend time with her because he’d rather go work out or do sports-related stuff with his friends. She used to get kind of annoyed and insecure about it because she’s a stupid girl sometimes. But now she’s staring at his body, and she’s thinking that she’s actually really, really _glad_ that he works out. Because it makes him look really _good._

“Oh my God, what?” he finally says underneath the insane length of her scrutiny. He’s shifting his weight around. “You’re freaking me out.”

“Relax,” she tells him absently, still staring at his abs.

She’s telling herself that she’s trying to rectify something here. She’s reminding herself that she keeps making these dumb mistakes — like she keeps shrinking away from him when she should’ve been like, fucking _running to him_ this entire time.

So she takes a step forward and presses the bodies together. He says, “Oh my _God,”_ when she does it. She mashes herself into his chest. She runs her hands around his back, holding onto him. And then she falls backwards, taking them both back down to the bed.

He’s like, _“Fuck,”_ as his arms go wobbly, as he tries not to crash completely on top of her. He whines and groans and he says, “What the hell, this is so _nice,”_ as he drops some of his weight on top of her.

She agrees with this. She is dragging her hand up and down his bare back, just getting used to feel of his naked skin, as she twists his head around — his shaved hair tripping her hand up for a second — before she sucks out another filthy-hot kiss from him.

They end up making out messily on the bed with their shirts off for a long time. They twist and roll around, alternating who gets to be on top. His hands keep running up and down her back — warm and firm. She keeps whimpering in appreciation, as she figures out new and interesting ways to kiss him with her entire mouth. She has noticed that he still won’t touch her boobs. She’s in the midst of gathering enough courage to just grab his hand and put it on her chest. But she keeps getting distracted because he keeps pressing the naked planes of their bodies together.

Every time she breaks apart from his mouth to lay kisses on other parts of him — his neck, his shoulder, his chest — he keeps peeking at the clock, with his mind in an utterly confused scramble. His brain is telling him they just have _so much time_ together right now. His brain doesn’t know what they are going to do together for _hours._ He gasps when she shimmies down and puts her wet mouth on his nipple. He kind of cries out a little helplessly as she full-on just licks him. She tells him that he is salty all over from the ocean. He clenches up. He tells her to just please shut up with the things she is saying to him right now.

And then he grabs her by the shoulders and pushes her off of him. He hovers over her, straddling her, not touching her much except for his hands on her shoulders. He presses her into the mattress so that he can get a break from the sensory overload.

Then he looks down at her body. Her face. Her heavy-lidded eyes. Her lips. And then he tells her, “You’re so fucking _hot._ I just can’t _stand it_ sometimes.”

This admission makes something surge inside of her. It’s confidence. This is why she asks him, “How would we have sex — the first time that we have sex?”

He presses her harder into the mattress as he grunts in frustration. He is kind of joking as he tells her, “Probably really fast, really rough, really sweaty, and really noisily.” He shakes his head. He is just _dying_ here. “Or really apprehensively, really carefully, really politely, and really awkwardly.”

“I mean, like, logistically. How do we — like, what will happen?”

He is looking at her breasts as he says, “Whatever you want to happen.”

“Okay, stop being sexy,” she says. “I’m asking you a serious question here.”

“Baby, I don’t fucking have a sex itinerary already mapped out in my head,” he says, shaking his head at her, looking at her face now. “I’m just gonna wing it. Play it by ear. Ask you questions. Get cues from you. Run away when you start screaming at me.” He weirdly kind of starts to smile — at the fantasy of that — of her screaming at him because he accidentally made one wrong move. He cheerily thinks that he might be getting one-hundred percent used to her nutty body-consciousness! Maybe!

His hands are still on her shoulders, pushing her into the bed as he looms over her — she realizes that he is holding her down. And then she realizes that _Moss was right!_ Grey _does_ like holding women down! And then out loud, she says, “Oh my God, Mars is _right._ You _do_ fuck!” She means that he knows enough about sex to be casually improvisational about it. He knows enough about sex to play it by ear and get cues from her.

He is totally confused. He says, “I’m sorry, what now?”

“You’re good at sex,” she says, grimacing. She is grimacing because she has a very limited repertoire of sex moves. He’s going to find this out.

“What? No. _What?_ No.” He shakes his head. “So many things, babe. First, I don’t want to give you a complex, but it’s so weird that you talk to your brothers more about our sex life than you talk to me about it. Like, I’m not sitting around with Azzie talking about what sex preferences you’d hypothetically have. Secondly, your brother is making fun of me when he says that stuff.” At this point, Grey lowers his voice into a stage whisper. There’s no feeling or emotion in his voice as he quietly says, “The joke is that I can’t actually physically fuck.” And then at his normal speaking volume he says, “I actually can. You’ll see! But, I mean, in his point of view, he’s like, ‘Oh, Grey doesn’t have a dick. That’s hilarious. He _fucks.’_ It’s kind of like, an ironic sort of little joke.”

“Okay,” she says flatly. She wishes she can cross her arms right now to show him how unimpressed she is that he thinks she’s so stupid she doesn’t know how jokes work. She says, “I know jokes. And I know my brother better than you know him. And he is not joking. He is being serious when he says that stuff.” And then she pauses with a start. She blinks her eyes rapidly and stares up at his thoughtful face. She says, “Grey, did you think that he was just being the biggest asshole to you this entire time? And you were still friendly with him?”

“I don’t take it too personally, Miss. It’s just a joke.”

“Oh my God! If you explain jokes to me one more fucking time!” She kind of arches up in frustration and bounces him on top of her a little bit. Then she corrects her tone and reasonably says, “He’s being for real. He thinks you’re good at sex.”

“Oh,” Grey says. He is not sure how to respond to this. He says, “That’s nice? I guess. I guess you’ll see for yourself at some point. You can go back and report to your brothers, whether or not they are right. You can tell them if anyone gets peed on or if anyone like, I don’t know what else — Christ.”

 

 

  
He ends up letting her go and rolling off of her at some point — when he has to get up to go pee into a toilet and not on her — for real. He automatically picks his shirt off the floor to put it back on before he leaves the room, but her voice stops him. She tells him to leave it off. He looks over his shoulder at her and there is just a lot more of that delicious-ass sexual tension that she is really becoming well acquainted with.

When he comes back, he has a bag of candy. He found it lying around in one of the cabinets. It’s packaged candy — gummy fruit candy. He tells her that he used to love this shit when he was a little kid. He spends a few minutes Googling the ingredients on his phone, just to double-check that it’s gluten-free even though he knows it is. She generally watches him do this with hearts in her eyes, which he does not catch because his focus on his phone is intense.

And then they basically snuggle together underneath the covers with their shirts off, eating candy. She buries her face into his chest and rubs her nose in between his really, really modest cleavage. It makes him laugh and hold onto her tighter. They roll around a few times. He tells her she smells like sunscreen. He also tells her that he thinks she got darker. She tells him that she better have, because she was sweltering in the brutal heat for _hours._

He tells her that maybe tomorrow, she will come out into the water with him. He tells her that he’ll ensure that she doesn’t drown. He can like, teach her how to surf if she’s up for it. He can also like, just hang out with her on a paddle board. Or they can swim. He tells her that the sky is the limit, really.

Before she falls asleep against him, she drowsily tells him that she’s not very athletic, and that must suck for him. He tells her that he doesn’t care. He also tells her that she honestly doesn’t try very hard to put herself out there. He tells her he gets it. It’s scary to, because the threat of injury is real. The threat of discomfort and embarrassment is real. And then he shrugs. He tells her it’s just like anything else, really. Stuff is just hard.

He says, “I think you’ll find that once you get more confident just moving your body in different ways, you’ll find that your body can take you to some really cool places and really cool experiences. And that’s worth it.”

Against his chest, she murmurs, “It sounds like you’re talking about sex.”

He says, “Um, I wasn’t. But I guess it applies both ways.”

 

 

  
The sun is setting when she wakes up again. She is also alone in bed, something she notes with disappointment.

When she walks out into the living with a light cardigan pulled over her body and her arms hugging herself, she actually finds both Grey and Azzie sitting on the floor, Azzie behind Grey. They are both not wearing shirts. Azzie is digging his hands into Grey’s back.

Azzie smiles at her and calls her Sleeping Beauty. She responds to this by asking them what they are doing. Azzie maintains his smile as he tells her that he’s working out some of the knots and kinks from Grey’s body, which makes her suddenly remember that Grey once told her that Azzie was a massage therapist when he lived in King’s Landing.

Azzie says, “I don’t know if you know this about him, but he’s kind of holds a lot of tension in his body.” And then after a pause, he says, “I can do you next.”

Her eyes go wide. She immediately says, “No!” kind of really rudely. And then she realizes how it sounds, so she apologetically softens her tone and says, “I’m weird about my body.”

Azzie straight up is like, “Why? It’s tight,” as he digs his thumbs into Grey’s shoulder, making Grey twitch and grimace. Azzie says, “I get why he’s weird about his body, because you know — he’s been through a lot. But you’re just a beautiful woman.”

They kind of have a unsatisfying conversation about it that lasts for five minutes. Grey generally stays quiet and watches the exchange, as she broadly explains to Azzie that her issues with her body probably stem from like, feeling uncomfortable when men look at her. She thinks that answer sounds bland and reasonable enough that he’d drop it, but he actually tells her how she should feel. He tells her that the human body is this piece of art and that every body is beautiful and special in its uniqueness. He tells her that in their culture, bodies are celebrated and adored. He tells her that he finds Western culture to be pretty prudish, uptight, and narrow-minded. He tells her that Summer Islanders are more free and open with sex, that women aren’t ever made to feel ashamed of pleasure and the power of their bodies.

She really _resents_ that he is implying that the power of her body resides in her vagina. This is why, out loud, she says, “So that’s why prostitution just runs rampant here, and no one even gives a fuck about what it does to a generation of women and children.”

Azzie says, “Whoa.” Because he is discovering this latent intensity and stubbornness in her that he didn’t know existed. She, in turn, is discovering this lackadaisical don’t-give-enough-shits life perspective that she already knew existed, but the dark side of which has never been so baldly laid out in front of her before.

He tells her that it’s all good — that the point of life is just trying to be happy. He just says a bunch of quotable, empty things that don’t make sense to her, just to keep the peace. She is also learning that he doesn’t like conflict — another thing that makes him different from Grey.

 

 

  
She’s a little quiet and maybe a little cranky still, when Grey walks into the bedroom to change into a shirt. She is maybe a little cranky that he said jackshit during her entire exchange with his brother — which, she knows, is probably unreasonable.

When he turns around, he is grinning at her. He says, “That was fun.”

She glares at him. She says, “Was it entertaining?”

He says, _“Very.”_

She’s about to roll her eyes at him because he’s such a fucking punk sometimes, but then he reaches out for her. He grabs her by the hips and guides her forward. He starts nuzzling her neck. He kisses her softly as he holds onto her. She pretty much goes to goo at this, and lets him hold some of her weight as she sinks into him. Her arms come up to circle around his shoulders. They are swaying in place. She’s about to say something crazy like how she thinks she might love him — but instead, he says, “You handled that really well. I love my brother to death — but he’s sometimes like — a little like, la-la. It drives our dad insane.”

 

 

  
If Grey is surprised that Azzie’s lady is more than ten years older than Azzie — maybe even fifteen years older — he doesn’t show it. He just goes in for the hug and tells her that he’s heard a lot of good things about her.

If Missandei was feeling kinda self-conscious about how Grey is all over her when they are out in public — like how he sometimes holds her hand for two seconds or how he sometimes gives her a sideways hug — then she is utterly shocked at the sight of Azzie and Tarra. Tarra is like, sitting on Azzie. They have to take talking breaks every three seconds to kiss each other on the mouth. There is some light baby-talking, which Grey and Missandei and Yara find utterly disgusting. Obara is tolerant of it enough.

Beyond that, things are very pleasant thus far and Tarra seems very nice and very compatible with Azzie. Her command of the Common Tongue is pretty good. They have ordered drinks and an entire spread — all naturally gluten-free except for some flatbread. Missandei reaches out to slap Grey’s hand when he eagerly reaches for it. He looks stunned and also adorably wounded. She says, “Don’t,” because she wants to make out with him later and she doesn’t want to wait for him to clean his entire mouth before doing it.

They all learn Tarra has an adult son who is a tattoo artist. She asks them if any of them want some ink while in the Isles. Grey nicely and hilariously tells her that he’s totally good on the ink, as her eyes rove over his body, looking at his unmarred exposed skin.

Once the seafood comes, Grey’s lack of penis ends up being a really hot topic at dinner. Azzie has clearly told Tarra all about his brother, and neither of them seem to have a sense of personal boundaries. Missandei actually wants to fucking punch this woman out, but she is having a hard time finding a good opening — for the fucking punch. She just sits there and angrily stews, as Yara — who has been working on her subtext-reading skills — gently pats and squeezes Missandei’s leg under the table. Yara is saying, there-there, it’ll be okay. Just relax. Just relax.

Tarra tells Grey that there is a god of lovers who also doesn’t have male parts. Grey is like, oh, that’s nice. Their culture has probably hundreds of gods, so he can’t keep them all straight, nor does he want to — because he believes in nothing. He refrains from outing himself as an atheist to Tarra though, because he’s pretty sure that it will result in an hours-long conversation about just a bunch of shit he is not interested in whatsoever.

Tarra brings up spiritual penises. And Yara helpfully says, “What is that? Are you talking about phantom cock?” before she turns to Grey. This clues Missandei onto the fact that they have totally had a conversation about this before. And _what?_ Just how freaking _close_ are Yara and Grey?

Tarra is not talking about phantom cock, but something else. Maybe some tantric-y sex stuff.

And _this_ is the point during dinner when Azzie helpfully tells his woman that Grey and Missandei actually haven’t had sex with each other yet. Because of the penis thing, probably.

Obara looks surprised. Yara does not. Tarra takes the information in stride. Grey is violently blank right now, which she knows means that he’s probably also ready to punch a bitch. Missandei is actually not that embarrassed about this — because this dinner is _bananas_ and nothing surprises her anymore.

She actually corrects Azzie. She is currently so freaking sick of him and his irresponsible disregard of facts. She is annoyed and ticked off as she says, “Actually, it’s not just because of the penis thing. It’s mostly because I was sixteen years old the last time I had sex.”

 _“What!”_ Obara exclaims — super loudly. She stuns herself and looks around the room — it’s already noisy with other diners and no one is even noticing her.

 

 

 


	42. Missy loves Grey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Missy continues handling business, the love of her life just gets drunk because what else is he supposed to do with all of this newfound free time? Missy finds a kindred spirit in Obara.

 

 

It is bizarre and crazy, but possibly for the first time in his entire life, the sex freakshow at the dinner table is not him. It is actually his woman. She took a real fucking bullet for him — like a fucking hero — and he is stunned speechless over it. He just stares at her unblinkingly with really amused psycho eyes that go OMG as she tells everyone to just give the penis talk a freaking break. She gets a little flummoxed when Azzie tries to placate her by telling her he did not mean any offense with what he said. Her confidence takes a bit of a hit with that — she questions herself and wonders if she is blowing this out of proportion, but then she valiantly recovers and stutters out, “W-when was the last time the entire conversation at dinner revolved around _your penis?”_ Missandei then gestures to Yara, who looks surprised and points to herself like, who me? “Or your _vagina?”_ Missandei points to Obara, “Or _yours?”_

Her impassioned speech generally falls on deaf ears, which is something Grey is pretty familiar with. It’s actually why he just leans into the penis talk and had to develop a real kickass sense of humor about it. People are just annoying.

Unsurprisingly, everyone just starts grilling Missandei with really personal questions. Like, the entire table is really stuck on the fact that Missandei is so hot, so how is it _even possible_ that she hasn’t had sex since she was a child?

The articulation of this is grossing her out, so she keeps helplessly asking them to stop saying that the last time she had sex was in childhood. It sounds so gross.

Yara is like, “Were you molested by an uncle or something?”

Missandei’s jaw drops. “Yara!”

“Look, we all have really creepy uncles.”

Missandei is shaking her head. She says, “No, we all don’t. But you and me should revisit this conversation later, okay?”

Yara shrugs.

Missandei ends up telling them something Grey already knows — the sad story about how her high school boyfriend broke up with her because his parents were bigots, and he was a doormat. And probably racist, too? Missandei says, “Isn’t it kind of racist to be complacent about racism?”

No one cares about this. No one wants to talk about racism. They are all really stuck on the sex stuff.

“So when you say you haven’t had sex since you were sixteen, are we talking like _everything,_ or are we just talking about just penetration?” Obara asks. “Like, can we define sex?”

“I think that’s important,” Tarra says. “Sex is more than just a physical act.”

“No,” Yara corrects. “It’s basically a physical act. I can’t have sex with you, with just my mind. Otherwise it’s like —” She momentarily shuts her eyes. “There, I just raped you. Just now. With my mind.”

“Yara!” Missandei says, just horrified.

“Missy, you act like we just met like, _yesterday.”_ And then Yara thoughtfully says, “We’ve been friends since college. How did I not notice this crazy streak of celibacy? I mean, I knew there was a streak, but I thought it was like, an eight-year streak. But since you were a _child?_ Holy shit, am I an inattentive friend?”

“Yes,” Obara says, answering for Missandei.

As everyone continues terrorizing the shit out of Missandei, Grey just generally chills with his tiny bottle of hard liquor because he is not allowed to drink beer tonight. Because he’s going to get a little something-something from her later, probably something sexy, so he has to be ready for it. He just generally sits there and relaxes with his tiny cup of booze as he listens to her field a bunch of intrusive questions about sex like a fucking champion. This is honestly like a fucking vacation for him. It’s like a vacation in a _vacation!_ This is fucking _awesome._

She tells them she didn’t have _any kind_ of sex after high school because she was so sick and so depressed.

The rest of them — having never been clinically depressed before — don’t understand why depression would prevent her from like, getting dicked. She has to explain like, a bunch of brain chemistry stuff to them, which half of the table is not into — the Azzie and Tarra half. They actually tell her that meditation, offerings to the gods, and some herbal tinctures might help her with her sex drive.

This is why Missandei — so fucking tired of their hatred of science and of everyone’s complete lack of empathy — says, “Actually! I’m okay now! I am on my antidepressant. And I am on my thyroid medication. I’m good to have sex _now!_ Thanks for your _concern!”_

As a joke, Yara says, “Well, get in there already, Grey!”

He just shrugs. He just holds up his tiny cup of liquor to her, and then he knocks it back. Because he does not even give a fuck right now. He might be drunk, actually.

 

 

  
After a gruesomely long argument-discussion about whether or not penetration is the worst or the best part of sex — Yara thinks it’s the worst because she’s a feminist and Tarra thinks it’s the best because she is naturally a really sexual being — Yara gets ticked off enough to just start drinking with Grey in solidarity. She is _over this bullshit_ because obviously women have been fucking brainwashed into thinking that their own pleasure doesn’t fucking _matter._ Just to be petty, Yara randomly yells out, “Straight men are _horrible_ at giving oral!” to no one in particular. She just shouts it out to the universe. Yara then orders more small bottles of the clear liquor stuff and quickly catches up to Grey by taking like, ten tiny cups of the stuff in a row. He says, “Wow,” as he ignores the fact that his brother is making out all blatant with his older girlfriend on the other side of the table. Tarra clearly did not take their argument as personally as Yara did.

Grey is making a mental note to fucking talk to their parents about the fucking Mommy issues that their mother might have given Azzie. That will be great. She will love it.

He clinks glasses with Yara and then they both suck down another drink. It is easier and easier the more they do this.

Next to them, Obara and Missandei are having a really deep and really personal conversation that Grey and Yara both keep unwittingly eavesdropping on because of proximity and because he and Yara totally have nothing to say to each other right now.

Missandei and Obara are holding each other’s hands, really dramatically, and they are facing each other, pressed knees to knees. Have they been drinking, too? Grey cannot tell.

Obara is telling Missandei that it was actually really complicated for her, emotionally, to have sex with Yara for the first time ever, even though she was in love with Yara. Because Obara had only been with men before Yara. Obara says that it’s hard to completely shift the construct of sex and also of what instigates sexual attraction when one kind of construct has just been hammered into her head since birth. At that point, Missandei loudly screams, _“Right!”_ which clues Grey onto the fact that she definitely has been drinking.

This makes Yara chuckle quietly, next to him. She lightly clinks glasses with him again before taking another shot — she is about to pass out. He can tell.

Missandei kind of has a moment of lightning bolt clarity. She sits straight, and she stares at Obara with her eyes open and wide. She really loves that they are bonding right now. She loves that she’s like, the person that Obara is most interested in right now. She loves that she hasn’t said anything fucking weird yet. To Obara, she says, “Okay, so I just figured out that two women having sex would be kinda like how me and Grey would have sex — because you know —”

“No cock,” Obara supplies.

 _“Yes!”_ Missandei says, clapping her hands together. And then she says, “How do you guys have sex? Like, logistically?”

Grey cracks up at that. He knocks his head full-on into the table, startling Azzie and Tarra. He blindly reaches out to try and shove Missandei. He loudly tells her, “That’s such an intrusive and personal question!”

“No, it’s cool,” Obara says to him. “I don’t mind answering!”

 

 

  
At the end of the night, Azzie wants to go and “fuck the shit” out of Tarra — this is what his brother says to him even though Grey completely did not ask to know. Azzie hands over the keys to his truck and tells Grey to come pick up him in the morning or something. He’ll text Grey the address. Grey tells Azzie that he is completely in no state to fucking drive? But Azzie is not really concerned. He shrugs and then reaches out to squeeze Grey in a tight hug. He has faith Grey will figure it out. He kisses Grey on the side of his head and says, “Love you, baby bro. So glad you are here,” before he lightly slaps Grey in the face. “Don’t fuck up my truck, okay?”

“I am drunk!” Grey repeats.

Azzie waves him off, curling an arm around Tarra. He says, “You’ll figure it out, man. I know you will.”

Grey unsteadily walks back into the restaurant. Yara is passed the fuck out. Obara and Missandei are still staring into each other’s eyes and having just the most intense conversation ever, Jesus Christ. He does a quick assessment, and he decides that Obara is the most sober of everyone.

He walks over and lightly touches her cheek to get her attention. He says, “Can you drive right now?”

She says, “I’d rather not.”

“How long until you can drive?”

“Maybe half an hour.”

As he sits back down in his chair, he says, “Okay, let’s do it. Let’s wait half an hour.” He pulls Yara’s hair off of her face. Then he flags a server. Azzie also totally left him with the check on this one.

Grey orders a few water bottles before settling the bill. He tosses bottles at Missandei and Obara, before he tries to wake Yara up enough to attempt to hydrate her. It doesn’t work. So he just sleepily sits there with his head in his hands, waiting for time to pass, intermittently taking pulls of water. He absently listens to Obara and Missandei talk about their childhoods and how they both have fathers who cheated on their mothers. They are both talking about how sometimes they have unfairly punished their mothers for the shit their fathers have done because they are just flawed people. They also talk about makeup and their skincare regimen for long, long minutes. Grey gets up to pee a few times during their date.

After exactly thirty minutes, Obara stands up and holds out her hand to him. She says, “I’m ready to drive now.”

He tiredly hands the keys over. And then he tiredly bends over and pulls Yara’s arm over his shoulders. She is heavier than Missandei, but it’s okay. He picks her up anyway, and the entire staff at the restaurant hollers out to them, saying bye happily. Because they have spent an enormous amount of money on alcohol tonight.

 

 

  
Obara has to drop them off at Azzie’s house and will take the truck with her to the hotel because Grey is still so drunk. When she says goodbye to Yara, Missy tries to shake her friend awake. Missy randomly asks, “Do you still think I’m a bigot? I want to have sex with Grey now.”

Yara is lying down with her head in Obara’s lap. She groans like she is in pain. She still has the wherewithal to say, “Oh my God, I never said you were a bigot. I just said you’re sexually basic as fuck. And I was right! God! Fifteen years without sex!”

Grey is standing outside of the truck, gripping the door, patiently waiting for Missandei to finish her really shitty taunting effort. In response to Yara’s accurate, incisive, and drunken recap of the facts, Missandei says, “I regret bringing this up.”

“Night, my babies!” Obara says, pushing Missandei out of the way before slamming the door shut.

 

 

  
When they get into Azzie’s place, Missandei drags him — stumbling — to the bedroom. He is dizzy, and he tries to smile at her and tell her that he’s actually in no state to like — do much with her. He’s sorry for this.

She lays him down on the bed. She sits on top of him, straddling his stomach. She pulls her shirt off in one quick motion because she might be getting good at this now. And then she reaches around and unclips her bra. She lets that drop too.

And then she grabs his hands and puts them on her breasts. She darkly thinks that sexually basic bitches probably don’t do this shit, as he is like, “Oh _fuck,”_ as he just like — as his mind blanks out and he starts just touching her on autopilot. He squeezes and holds the soft, soft weight of her breasts in his hands. He lightly runs his thumbs over her nipples. It makes her start to pant and instinctively grind down on him. Her voice is dark and breathy as she tells him that it feels so good. He’s about to say, fuck it, let’s just have sex. Right now.

But then he convulses. He knocks her off of him. He rolls over with his hand covering his mouth — and then he makes a run for the bathroom.

 

 

  
Missandei runs after him — to make sure he gets to the toilet okay. She’s still topless as she gets there in time to watch him heave loudly and painfully into the bowl. She hears a lot of liquid drop and a lot of splashing. She flicks on the light so that she can see him. And then she sits on the ground next to him, rubbing his back encouragingly, pressing kisses into his shoulder, whispering words of encouragement to him as he just throws up his entire dinner into the toilet.

He groans at the end of it — after a painful few heaves of saliva and drops of bile and nothing else. He hugs the toilet bowl with his eyes shut as she flushes it for him.

She says, “Oh my God, you are so drunk,” in marvel as she pulls him to his feet, as she leans him against the bathroom counter. “How did this happen?”

“I was _bored!”_ he says miserably. When he opens his eyes and sees her — sees her naked torso — he’s like, “Oh my God, are you _serious?_ What the _fuck!_ I hate _myself!”_ He means that he is so pissed that he’s so drunk that he can’t do nothing with her beautiful naked body right now.

“Baby,” she says, running water from behind him. She generally knows what he means. “You’re so cute right now.”

“I just fucking vomited up everything inside of me. I can still smell it and taste it. But thanks.”

She helps him brush his teeth and rinse out his mouth before she brushes her own teeth and gets ready for bed. The both of them keep staring at her boobs through the mirror — in different ways. He keeps looking at her and grinding out aggressive-sounding groans because she is so hot. In contrast, she keeps feeling gleefully stunned that she is basically naked around him — and it feels totally okay and great and sweet. She doesn’t feel self-conscious about it. The sounds that he keeps making — his general want of her — help keep her self-consciousness at bay.

The concept of someone wanting her body like this was previously very abstract and also sinister. It was men she didn’t know, that she passed by on the street. Or it was a bunch of coworkers she thought were nice guys, who secretly said terrible, dehumanizing things about her behind her back.

It feels different to be looked at by someone who cares as much as he does about her. It makes her heart beat hard, like it knows it is alive. It makes tears sting the backs of her eyes, because it’s so different from what she has previously known. It makes her kind of feel like she is capable and strong — like, it is actually _empowering,_ the way he acts like he loses a little bit of his mind, at the sight of her body.

She says, “Grey, I love you,” to him, as he holds the bathroom counter in a vice-grip so he doesn’t fall right over. She looks at his face through the mirror as she says it.

He grimaces because he’s so nauseous. He says, “Don’t cry,” because she is crying. He also says, “I love you, too.”

She ends up needing to help him walk back to the bedroom. He just has no ability to stay upright right now. They almost careen into a wall, but they generally make it to the bed without anyone getting injured. She climbs over him and helps him take off his shirt and his shorts before she has him climb up a little higher and get under the blankets. She quickly wraps up her hair and takes down her pants before she crawls in next to him, wearing just her underwear.

He mutters, “Oh shit,” when she presses her naked chest against his bare back. Her hand slides over his stomach to hold onto it, going a little low. He says, “You’re big spoon tonight? Okay. Okay.”

 

 

He is so hungover when he wakes up — so he’s still incapable of messing around with her. It doesn’t matter to her, though. She just continues watching him fight between being awake and being unconscious. She just continues rubbing her hand up and down his bare chest. She’s currently more into the comfortableness of being naked around him than the sexiness of it.

They drifted apart during the night — because he was so getting so hot and so sweaty that it was uncomfortable for her to stay pressed up against him.

As he wakes up more and more, he grabs her wrist to still her hand. He transfers his grasp to her hip, prompting her to roll over, which she does. She rolls over onto her side as his hand slides up her stomach and cups her right breast. He’s hugging her into a little cocoon. His thumb is going up and down her smooth skin, as he kisses the back of her neck, at the top of her spine. His voice is sleep-heavy as he tells her he feels like hot garbage — but he thinks that she feels and smells really nice.

She smiles so brightly to herself and pretty much has to stop herself from saying a bunch of batshit things to him — stuff about how she thinks that she’s going to love him forever — that they are probably going to be in love with each other forever — and how he should just move into her apartment with her because he needs to leave his parents’ house anyway, and she just wants to sleep with him every night now. She can’t go from getting to be with him every night to going home and crawling into bed alone.

 

 

  
Grey is a cranky walking dead person when Obara arrives with Yara. Funnily enough, Yara is the exact same way. The first thing she says to Grey when she sees him is that she demands to know why he let her drink so much. He snaps back at her and tells her that she’s a fucking grownass adult who chose to drink as much as she did, so it’s her own goddamn fault that she is hungover.

Neither of them want to eat — but Missy and Obara still do, so they end up at a rice bowl place after some avid Googling and discussion. Missandei orders him a smoothie even though he tells her he doesn’t want anything. He is unimpressed that she got him sustenance anyway. He ends up gagging around the straw of his smoothie to prove to her that he wasn’t fucking around. He can’t eat right now.

She reaches out to massage the back of his neck. She asks him if he just wants to go back to Azzie’s place and just sleep some more. This kind of makes him realize he’s being a real petulant bitch. He tells her that he can sleep at the beach. He doesn't want to fuck up other people’s good time by being a useless bitch.

She steadily says, “Okay.”

At the beach, he and Yara just collapse down in the hot sand. Obara is kind of nervous that they are going to get like, heat stroke or something because they are so dehydrated. She nudges Yara butt with her foot and slams big bottles of water into the sand. Obara tells the both of them to remember to drink water. Like, they better have consumed all of the water by the time she and Missandei come back to check on them.

As Obara and Missandei walk out to the water dragging paddle boards behind them, Obara says that she is so glad she didn’t drink as much as Yara and Grey did. She tells Missandei that Yara was just a real fucking mess when they got back to the hotel. Just vomit. Everywhere. Missandei cheerfully says the same! Grey puked so much last night!

Obara is really good at water stuff — which is not a surprise at all. Obara is also very nice and patient. She teaches Missandei how to get on and off the board, how to paddle, where to sit, and Obara generally assures Missandei they won’t go to far out. Missandei refrains from telling Obara that she is pretty familiar with water, because she’s Naathi. She refrains because Obara is being so sweet to her right now.

They end up floating and swimming out in the ocean for about an hour. They have meandering conversations together — about their families some more, about their relationships, also about being women in general — then they go back in to check in on Grey and Yara, who actually have faithfully been taking sips of water. About half of their bottles are gone when Missy and Obara walk up to them.

Looming over him, blocking the sun, she asks him how he’s doing. He rolls onto his back, and he tells her he’s doing pretty shittily. He tells her, “I’m so sorry I can’t go out there with you right now.”

She says, “It’s okay! Obara and I are fine!”

 

 


	43. Grey gets cold feet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the L-word blurt, Grey gets mega weird around the love of his life. Because he's just so bad at feelings. Poor Missy. JK, she's a champ so she's okay. Also, a flamingo gets eaten in this chapter.

 

 

 

The rest of the week passes by in a bit of an action-packed blur. While Azzie is at work, they take a car and spend a fair bit of time with Grey’s extended family — an entire day spent at his great aunt’s house on a remote farm on the edge of the jungle, accessible by a single dirt road. He tries to get Yara and Obara to bow out, telling them that it’ll be so boring for them, but they sense that he is trying to hide something — so they insist on coming.

It gets waaay ethnic at his aunt’s house. There are animals running around everywhere — a few dogs with testicles intact, which is something Missandei tries to catch his eye on, to smile with him over. However, he is really preoccupied with being the man of the hour. His great aunt holds his hands and tells him she hasn’t seen him since he was a child. He tells her technically it was five years ago, but same difference. Then he discreetly starts handing out cash to all of his gathered relatives. It is a mixture of money from his parents and also from him. There’s an entire procedure and ritual around it, with each relative humbly saying a lot of nice things about his parents — notably his father — as they take the cash and immediately pocket it without counting.

Missandei actually realizes that formal introductions may not come naturally to him because it might not be a part of his culture. People just show up to family gatherings and seamlessly blend in.

Yara and Obara have to put up with a major language barrier, and they offer really valiant efforts at not sticking out. Missandei alleviates her social anxiety by focusing on being a translator. She just tells them what people are saying — as Grey’s relatives realize with a shock that she speaks Summer Tongue. This results in a fair bit of misunderstanding. They assume that she is also from the Isles, and they start telling everyone that she is one of them. She has to awkwardly interject and tell them that she is not — she just learned the language.

There is just a lot of sitting around and lounging — the pace of life is very slow and sometimes very quiet. She, Yara, and Obara probably spend an entire hour staring at boiling water in a massive pot in the middle of the yard.

And then a pink flamingo gets brutally murdered in front of their faces — for dinner, in honor of Grey. Yara and Obara’s eyes go wide, because they are like, _OMG it is amazinggg._  They are both a tad blood-thirsty.

Missandei comes from a culture of pacifist vegetarians who are rather protective of animals — so the flamingo death is a little rough to watch because as it dies, it screams like it is human. So that generally shakes her to the core and stuff.

She watches, unblinkingly, as the dead bird gets slit down the middle, drained, and then plucked. She is told the feathers will be used to decorate clothing.

The dancing and the music starts up at this point.

And _then_ one of Grey’s really beautiful cousins or young aunts come out of the house wearing a bright cloak of feathers — and nothing else. Yara and Obara freeze at this point — staring silently — still mentally going _OMG, this is amazinggg!_

Grey looks intensely uncomfortable over the display, over this blessing, as he is given milk to drink — because his people deify family, and they like to ritualize the creation of family, and sex and love. He has to drink the milk so that he can be blessed with many, many children.

Missandei’s mind is generally screaming as she watches him, as he lifts up the cup to drink from it — because she doesn’t think the milk came from a cow at all. The milk must be from a different animal. Like, the milk might even be human.

Then she is given a small cup. After which, she panics. She panics so hard she just about drinks it because she’s so nervous about offending his family. The cup is heading to her mouth before Grey intercepts it — he picks it out of her hand and says, “Oh my God, what are you _doing?”_ And then to his relatives, in Summer Tongue, he firmly tells them that she cannot drink milk, so do not give her milk to drink. He says it like she is a child and she cannot be trusted to control what goes into her mouth, which may be right in this case. She is just easily influenced by culture and elders.

His other aunt tells him that she must drink. He says no, she cannot. And Missandei is about to reach out to gently tell him it’s okay. It’s probably human milk, so it’s probably okay — but one of his uncles reasonably tell him that it’s not very much milk. Grey is steadfast about this though.

This sits a little uneasy with everyone.

A bunch of them get super drunk by sundown, which makes her realize that the milk-drink was spiked with alcohol. As a bunch of his relatives get super drunk, they start getting amorous with their significant others or whoever is nearby.

Again, Yara and Obara love it and are sucking up all of the sights and information with their eyes. Again, Grey is really uncomfortable and stiff, but puts up with it for as long as he has to because he does not want to shame or sully his father and mother’s reputations.

Missy eats the flamingo soup and the roast meat, and it tastes fine, but she is _disgusted_ because she mentally cannot get over that they are eating a beautiful, decorative bird and not an ugly bird like a chicken. She can’t take more than a few bites because it is so distressing. She has to sneak bits of her portion onto Yara’s plate so that it doesn’t look like she is being disrespectful by rejecting their food. Yara is like, “Oh, damn. Thanks, babe,” as Missandei’s stomach turns.

On the way back to the city, Yara and Obara generally rave about the day on the farm. They jostle Grey on the shoulder as he drives, and they tell him that they have figured something out — he’s actually the weirdo. He’s actually the black sheep. His free-spirited, body-positive brother is like, the normal one.

In response to this, Grey says, “Yeah. My dad is the black sheep of his family, too. He doesn’t like to visit home more than once every few years because it makes him uncomfortable.”

And in response to that, Missandei says, “So now I know why why your dad likes to walk around the house without his clothes on.” Now, maybe she also knows why his parents apparently still have an active sex life after decades together.

He says, “Yeah, I don’t know, man. It’s all I’ve ever known.”

 

 

  
For the rest of the week, Grey generally behaves mega-weirdly around her — like, he armors up before bedtime, sometimes putting on clothes, like sweatpants over his boxers even though it is a million degrees hot. She is pretty sure he is freaking out because he never meant to drunkenly tell her that he loves her — but he did. And he can’t take it back.

She generally handles it well, she thinks. She doesn’t push him to say it again. She doesn’t say it to him again even though she feels it, because she doesn’t want to make him feel awkward with her feelings for him. She doesn’t try to take off his clothes again. She doesn’t try to put his hands on her boobs again. She just patiently waits out his process as she continues loving him from a distance. She tries to focus on other things. She drags them to museums for instance, even though they make fun of her and tell her she’s a real fucking nerd.

She attempts water sports. She is not great at at getting pulled by a rope while standing on a floating board on the water. She eats ocean time and time again, with her face, with her butt, but mostly with her face. The water rips her body and almost takes off her swimsuit bottoms a few times. Her life jacket is the only reason she is still alive. Everyone else is really good at wakeboarding — of course. So she generally just quietly deals with the humiliation of being shitty at something that just comes naturally to her friends.

She gets to spend half a day with Azzie without Grey around, because she and Obara take one of his diving classes while Yara and Grey go dive in open water for a bit to see how they feel before they attempt something more advanced. Grey is worried that Yara’s ability isn’t advanced enough for cave diving. He doesn’t want to get caught in a terrible situation that puts either of their lives at risk. Yara is not as concerned at all.

Missandei finds that Azzie is an awesome teacher — really friendly, really patient, great at explaining things, and amazing at encouragement. When she accidentally is super truthful to him — when she tells him that she fucking sucks so bad, and she’s sorry for dragging everyone else down with her lack of intuition for this shit — Azzie actually grasps her by the shoulders while they are still in the pool and he shakes her, to get her full attention. He tells her that she is actually doing great, and that learning can be difficult and challenging — but they are all here to have fun together and learn something new. They are not here to perform or to check things off checklists.

He says to her, “I know you can do this, sissy. I know you can relax and just enjoy it for what it is.” He has started calling her sissy because it rhymes with Missy. And because she’s a wimp.

No, actually, he’s been flagrantly calling her that because he is a freak, and he doesn’t care if he makes Grey uncomfortable by treating her like she is now part of their family.

 

 

  
Toward the end of the week, her hair is really dry and brittle. They have been going into the salt water _so much,_ and she’s been washing her hair _so much._ She didn’t bring enough hair product for this, so she borrows the truck to go to the store and buy herself more hair stuff.

She marvels at the sheer variety at the store — at home she gets an aisle. Here, she gets the entire beauty section.

She spots bags of his favorite candy brand, and she ends up grabbing about ten of them with both of her hands. She thinks that they can bring this home with them for him to enjoy later.

And when she comes back to the house, Grey and Azzie are actually having a really heated conversation together. There are empty beer bottles on the coffee table and some empty plates of food.

The front door is open — for airflow. She freezes when she overhears Grey darkly tell Azzie that Azzie is pretty great at getting up and leaving when shit gets hard. She overhears Grey say to Azzie that Grey doesn’t really want to listen to life advice from a person who is incapable of consistency and stability. And it makes her _flinch._

Then she also hears Azzie say, “Your problem is that nothing ever changes with you because you don’t really want to be happy.”

Her presence is detected after that. Azzie swivels around in his seat and looks at her, at where she is standing, at the front door. He says, “Oh, hey, sissy. Did you find what you were looking for? Are you hungry? There’s a plate on the stove for you.”

She nods. The house is pretty small, so it’s really awkward to be in the middle of their fight. She basically hops from place to place as quietly as she can, trying to ignore what they are talking about, which is not much. They stopped arguing when they realized she is home.

She is actually very hungry, so she grabs her plate of food and silently runs outside with it. She eats dinner by herself on the porch, with her phone clutched in her hand. She’s reading some news, Googling random things, checking her social media accounts.

After dinner, she quickly washes some dishes, and then she hides in the bathroom with her new hair products. She wets her hair and puts on a conditioning mask and generally stares at herself in the mirror — a little bored and a little miserable. This is actually kind of how it feels like when Mars and Moss fight. And when Mars and Moss fight, it is truly terrible because they are so close that they know the perfectly awfulest things to say to each other to really maim. She feels like that's what she walked in on tonight.

She actually has to get out of the bathroom because Grey has to pee. He knocks on the door and asks her if she’s going to be much longer.

She quickly gathers up her things and dumps them in the plastic grocery store bag with all of the candy before she takes that and hooks it over her hand. She opens the door shyly — with her hair all damp and shiny from conditioner. And she wordlessly slides past him and scurries to the bedroom, where she hangs out with her computer, trying to watch a TV show that isn’t blocked. She hides the candy in her suitcase because now she feels a little silly and embarrassed about it.

He comes into the bedroom five minutes later, pulling off his shirt as he gets ready for bed. He puts on a clean t-shirt and stoops down to gather up their dirty pile. He tells her he’s going to do one last wash before they go home. She says, “Okay,” and watches him as he carries the bundle out of the room.

She rinses her hair while he is gone. She gently scrunches it dry enough. Then she wraps it up and lies down, pressing her face into a pillow.

He shuts off the lights when he comes back. She hears him moving around in the dark for a little bit before he slides into bed, next to her.

After a pause that is long — one in which she can hear him breathing through — she says, “Are you okay?”

He says, “Yeah. Thank you.”

 

 

  
He wakes up on his last day in the Summer Isles feeling both dread and ease. He is simultaneously looking forward to going back to his real life as he also is scared of it. He has a load of work that he has to get back to, an aspect of his life that his brother does not understand. His brother does not understand the point of amassing so much money because money isn’t something they can take with them after they die. Grey has a really hard time imparting on his brother that his job is not about money, but about something more than just that. His work touches the daily lives of everyone, even Azzie. That is important. Grey has a hard time with sentimentality — with assigning the right words to the right feelings, so he is bad at explaining.

He is looking forward to being with her back at home — as he is simultaneously fucking terrified of the prospect of it. He’s done a bad job of playing it cool lately. He’s been overly invested and engaged lately. And that’s fine. But he’s also still in the mode of waiting and anticipating for her to change her mind about him. They haven’t even been dating for that long. She also doesn't know what it’s like to be with anyone else — not really. She is currently assuming that it doesn’t get better than him and _this,_ because she doesn’t know better. This is the exact same trap that he fell into with Alayaya. His new problem is that he is in love with someone new — in a completely adult way. So it’s going to be the biggest, most massive hit of pain, if this does not work out for him.

“What do you wanna do for breakfast, for our last day?” she asks sweetly, smiling at him, before she pulls the blanket up to cover her mouth. Then she just stares at him with her open eyes.

“I don’t know,” he says softly. “What do you want to do?”

She appears to think about it, with her gaze flipped up to the ceiling.

 

 

  
They all end up going back to the very first place they ate at again. Missandei says she wants a do-over. She was so tired and so drugged up the first time that she didn’t get to properly enjoy it.

Yara ends up tucking several paper napkins into Missandei’s cleavage, to help cover her pristine white shirt from the onslaught of spices and sauces that is about to hit the area. Yara ends up playfully sticking her finger down in between Missandei’s breasts, observing, “Ooh, it’s warm and kind of damp in there,” with a grin, as Missandei playfully-but-for-real swats Yara’s hand out of her cleavage.

So it makes sense why Yara covered up Missandei when the food comes. Missy ends up becoming a mess, smelling of garlic, paprika, and onions all over her face and mouth as she scarfs down the seafood for the first time. She keeps saying, “Oh my God, this is so _good,_ what the hell?”

The rest of them laugh at her — over her discovery. They also reminisce about what happened a mere week ago — what feels more like an entire month ago — with her just sitting there in a stupor the last time they were here.

After their late “breakfast,” they go to the beach one last time. Perhaps emboldened by the local culture and by the bucket of spicy shrimp that she has just consumed, Yara takes off her bikini top before she lies down and soaks up the sun. Grey cannot look at her after that. He cannot make eye contact as they talk, something that Yara gleefully observes to his face, over and over.

She says, “You can look! I don’t mind! Come on, take a look!”

He is saying, “Shut up. Jesus Christ, you are such a pain in the ass.”

He ends up dragging a board to the ocean, following behind his brother silently. As he walks into the water, he thinks that this will be a good way for him to clear out his head a little bit. He is leaving Missandei to hang out by herself. She has tied up her hair into a ball on top of her head. She has told him that she does not want to her submerge her entire head again, so she is just going to hang out on a paddle board, paddling around.

When he and Azzie come back in, Yara has turned over and Missandei has abandoned her board to lie down next to Obara. He drops down next to her, too, down to the warm sand. He shuts his eyes as he feels her pop on a pair of sunglasses onto his face. She’s telling him that sun rays can break through his thin eyelids. She is telling him, “If you want to keep your twenty-twenty vision, you should wear these.”

He says, “Thanks, babe.”

 

 

  
Yara says she wants to be hungover for their flight tomorrow, so she starts drinking with gusto around midday.

Missandei actually follows suit. She tells herself she’s trying to be cooler. She grabs Yara’s attention fully over a snack of grilled octopus on sticks. She gravely tells Yara that she can be fun — sometimes. Azzie laughs, clapping her on the shoulder warmly. He tells her that that’s the spirit. Yes, she is fun — sometimes.

Yara says, _“Seriously,_ Missy, I never said you aren’t fun. I never said you’re a bigot. I think you’re great. But you keep acting like I’m insulting you all the time.”

“You’re too cool for me,” Missandei admits, as she sucks down some palm wine, which is a misnomer. It’s actually a liquor and not a wine at all. “I feel like I’m grandfathered in. Your dork friend before you realized you could do better.”

“Oh my God, shut up,” Yara says.

“If it makes you feel better, I thought you were really pretty, really boring, and kind of snobby when we first met,” Obara offers. “Because you wouldn’t talk to anyone except for people you already knew. It took me a while to realize you were just really socially awkward.”

“Oh, snap!” Missandei says in awe. And then she reaches out to hold his hand, loosely intertwining their fingers together, swinging his arm lightly. She says, “He thought the same! He thought I was really boring and awkward — but also pretty, right?”

She sounds so insecure and uncertain — and it cheers him up. This really sad and brutal drunken self-reflection is really adorable to him. He thinks that she is just so heartbreakingly cute so he smiles at her in spite of himself, reassuringly. He squeezes her hand. He says, “Yeah, I thought you were _very_ pretty. And very boring.”

 

 

  
It took her most of the day, but she ends up lifting him out of his shitty mood. He can’t be cranky or pissed off or frustrated for very long over stuff he cannot change — because she keeps cracking him up with her tipsy giggling and just how fucking gullible she is. She keeps saying, “Oh _really?”_ whenever one of them tells her a blatant lie, like when Azzie tells her that before they met, Grey was talking about her all the time — always Missandei this, Missandei that.

Her face is so open and so vulnerable and so _happy,_ as she looks at him and gushes, _“Really?_ You talked about me like that before we were even together?” She is happy over the idea of him crushing on her so blatantly.

Reluctantly, he has to say, “Ah, no. I didn’t talk about you at all.” And then he reaches out to shove his brother roughly. Because that was mean. He says, “What the _fuck,_ man?”

Azzie is cracking up. He is shaking his head and waving his hands. He is saying, “I’m sorry! I didn’t realize that she’d be like — so moony about it. I’m sorry! I went too far!”

Her face adorably drops. She says, “Oh,” as she frowns. “So you didn’t talk about me at all. Because you weren’t thinking about me like that yet. It’s cool. It’s cool. No big deal. I don’t care.”

He can’t take this anymore, so he ends up pulling her to him. He ends up cradling her head in the crook of his arm to make her feel better. He ends up giving her a quick kiss on the mouth in public to reassure her of how he feels about her. He ends up quietly telling her that he was totally thinking about her like that back then — but he just kept it to himself. Because he is a coward.

He’s echoing her words to him on their kinda-first date. He searches her face for recognition, but she’s a little loopy and spacey. She just squeezes him tightly, lets out a soft, squeaky sigh. She cutely rubs her nose into his shirt. She softly tells him, “You’re not a coward. You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever known, Grey.”

He watches this happen — and it makes him think that he is completely fucked. He is just going to be obliterated by this person because he is just so love with her.

“Oh my God,” Yara says. “That’s so mushy.”

 

 

 


	44. Grey is a bougie bitch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that they are home in King's Landing, Missy and Grey have to navigate their new state of in-love-ness at home, with all of the home distractions. Grey also moves into nice new digs. Missy discovers the love of her life is fancy. BTW, Missy is still freaked out by sex.

 

 

She doesn’t get to ease back into her regular routine as much as her regular routine just smacks itself into her face. On her first day back in the office, Tyrion heatedly tells her that the game devs on the Delta Blue project — they assign code words to titles — sent a big spreadsheet to their translation team and the team lead did not request contextual information because Robbie, that idiot, took it up the ass and agreed to a ridiculous turnaround. When Tyrion finally managed to peek the project, he completely flipped out and made everything grind to a stop. He tells Missandei that now that she is back, he needs for her to go through that team and consult because he knows that they are not paying enough attention to culturization and there are probably mistranslations all over the place.

He asks her, “I’m sorry, but can you put some serious hours into this? We have to meet deadline, and we’re just hemorrhaging money to save the relationship at this point.”

Of course, she says, “Okay.”

So for the next week, as they ramp up for a holiday weekend, she just lives at the office. She gets there before anyone else and she leaves at midnight. She has stopped driving because Tyrion has given her a driver and is also taking care of all of her gluten-free, dairy-free meals so that she doesn’t have to focus on anything else but work. She writes a translation glossary, style guide, writes up biographies of characters, and generally creates a huge compendium of reference information for the translators. Robbie thinks it’s a waste of time, but Missandei is so tired and so ticked off that this is happening that she tells Robbie that _he’s a waste of time._

 

 

  
During the week, she manages to carve in a quick dinner with Dany, who is eager to see her — but mostly eager to get the gossip. Dany tells her that Yara revealed that a lot of “weird shit” went down in the Summer Isles. Dany messily grins and leans over the dining table conspiratorially. She sips from her glass of pure booze. She asks, “What weird shit happened?”

Missy wearily laughs as she sips from her cup of coffee. She tells Dany that the beautiful people of the Summer Isles are really sex positive. So a lot of casual nudity happened. Like, Yara learned that her nipples can get sunburnt and flake and chafe and itch like the rest of her skin. Yara told them all about that avidly on the plane ride home. Missy also tells Dany that she kind of got wrapped up in the energy herself. Like, she took off some of Grey’s clothes. Like, she took off her shirt and made him touch her boobs.

Dany gasps. And then she screams, “Oh my _God!_ Way to bury the lead!”

Missy chuckles as she sways in her seat. She says, “Yeah, it was cool and fun. But then he started barfing. So we had to stop.”

Dany screams out, “Oh my _God!”_ again, and then starts demanding details.

Missy has honestly never had this type of conversation with Dany ever before. When Dany started dating Drogo, Missy was too shy, too inexperienced, and too uncomfortable with sex to really solicit any details or really bask in her friend’s happiness in a new relationship. It was actually very businesslike, when Dany told her that she and Drogo were going to try and be weirdly exclusive with one another. And when Dany announced that she and Drogo were getting married, Missandei actually just felt sad about it, because she was losing her friend forever to some guy that she didn’t feel like she could be herself around. She had a hard time being happy for Dany.

So she feels kind of guilty right now, because Dany is just so _happy_ for her.

Dany doesn’t seem to give a shit. Dany is actually planning out the near future. She says that their lives are like a sitcom. They are best friends who are in relationships with a pair of best friends. It’s so neat and pat and they should _totally_ get together for a double date soon. They have never done this before because Grey and Drogo were on a break for a while and Dany didn’t want to like, push herself on people while they were trying to figure things out — but now they’ve all figured things out and so now they can all hang out together! Yay!

“Yeah,” Missy says. “Yay.”

“Are you guys excited to have sex with each other?”

This makes Missy laugh — kind of because she thinks it’s funny but also because it makes her panic. When he is close to her and nearby, she remembers what it feels like to want him — and she feels invincible. When he is far away and not visible, she finds that it’s easy to remember all of the things she is scared of.

She tells Dany that she’s scared she’s going to be bad at sex. She imagines that he’s going to want to like, put his mouth on her vagina at some point — she blushes so hard as she articulates this out loud — and she’s worried that she will taste disgusting and smell disgusting and that she’s going to like, either fart or shit in his face because maybe she accidentally eats dairy or gluten — or maybe her stomach just betrays her because she will be very nervous.

She is worried that she might think it’s a good idea to sedate herself with a Xanax before sex, and then she worries that for him, it will be like fucking a loopy corpse-like body. But if she doesn’t take a Xanax, it might be like fucking a stiff board that does _nothing_ besides lie there. She sarcastically tells Dany that she really wants their first time to feel like date rape for him.

She is worried that sex is going to naturally be really one-sided and unfair. Maybe he is the kind of person that gets off when his partner gets off — but then what happens when she _doesn’t get off?_ She could be fucking holding the hopes and dreams of two people in between her legs, and what if she is just _garbage_ at sex? She tells Dany that she is physically awkward, and her body just doesn't know how to move or do things. She tells Dany she’s been reading a lot of stuff about how people with disabilities have sex — and what if his body has remapped itself because of his injury? What if he orgasms through his nipples or worst yet, through _his foot?_ What if she has to do some complicated stuff involving pressure points, and what if she’s just so bad at it that he never orgasms in front of her and she’s just left holding his foot in her lap and _just crying_ over her inadequacy? What if he breaks up with her because he realizes that they will never have good sex together, ever?

Dany is like, trying so hard not to laugh right in Missandei’s face. She coughs a few times to hide her accidental chuckles. She hides her smile behind the glass of her martini, which is stupid because it’s all clear. Missandei can see through it. She can see that Dany is laughing at her. Dany still keeps licking her lips so that her mouth has something to preoccupy itself with, besides being insensitive to her friend’s deep anxieties about sex.

Dany says, “Just talk to him about this. Just ask him questions about what he likes and what he wants. And then do those things to him.”

Missandei’s face is on _fire._ She whines, “That seems so _embarrassing.”_

“Why? That’s pretty much how I figured out how to have sex with Drogo. Sex is super easy when you cheat and just ask for all of the answers beforehand.”

Missy is holding onto her cheek. She says, “The thought of asking him how he wants me to touch him just feels mortifying.”

“Well, get over it,” Dany suggests — helpfully. She toasts Missandei with her martini and empties the rest of it down her throat. Then she eats her olives before dropping the toothpick back into the glass.

 

 

  
He texts her sporadically over the course of the week. He ends up being a little busy, too. His work is actually still in a bit of unexpected lull, so he uses the time to sign a year-long lease for an apartment that his dad says he is overpaying on. His dad tells him that he should just buy property, because he has the money for it. His dad tells him it’s stupid to throw money down the crapper on rent. His dad tells him that he shouldn’t expect any help moving, because his dad is too old for that shit.

Grey generally listens to his dad bitch him out — like his dad has really, really missed him the week that he’s been gone — and it’s kind of like music to his ears. He misses the rigidity. He misses the drive toward constant excellence. He misses someone’s incessant belief in him and his abilities. He misses the way his dad mind-checks him and tells him to stop being a fucking moron all the time.

In his empty new apartment with parents, his dad is looking out the window and saying, “You pretty much have no problems in life, Nudho. So I don’t see why you always have your panties in such a fucking wad.”

His mom ignores that. As she walks around his living room in her overcoat — she has come straight from work. His mom actually says, “Your dad started volunteering a few days a week at a free clinic. That’s why his mood is so great.”

His dad laughs loudly at that, as he plants his butt against the window sill. He laughs with such affection for Grey’s mom because he knows that she is slyly telling him to relax and to cool it on their son, because he is a good son. His dad tries to reach out for her — but there’s the space of the entire room between them. Nevertheless, she walks over and grabs his hand. This is the first time they’ve seen each other all day.

“Do you they pay you?” Grey asks.

“Are you dumb?” his dad asks rhetorically, pulling Grey's mom over so she’s sitting next to him at the window sill. “It’s a free clinic. They don’t even give me lunch.”

Grey shrugs, smiling himself. “Well, that’s really nice of you, Dad — helping people out like that.”

“Nice has nothing to do with it,” his dad says gruffly. “I’m just so bored at home by myself all day.”

“Aw, you missed me.”

“I _did,”_ his dad says. “I _will.”_

 

 

  
He generally hates asking for help, so he mostly does a lot of the moving by himself. He only calls over Drogo and Tal when he needs their help moving big furniture like his couch and his bed and his cabinets.

It’s probably the first time in years that either guy has seen a significant amount of Grey’s stuff. Tal only remembers Grey’s bedroom at his parents house, full of mismatched furniture and lifesize cutout of Mr. T.

Drogo says, “Holy shit, you are bougie as fuck,” as he struggles underneath a china cabinet — a fucking china cabinet made of solid wood. He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, pausing as Grey and Tal figure out how to pivot it around the corner. Drogo asks, “Does Missy know how pretentious and hypocritical you are yet?”

“Hypocritical?”

“You keep acting like you are poor! But your dad is doctor! Your mom is a lawyer! Your furniture weighs like it is made of _gold.”_

“That’s real rich, D,” Grey says, panting. “You keep telling people you were raised by a single mom — misleading them — as you live in a house that has _twenty_ bedrooms in it.”

“Okay, eight, asshole,” Drogo cuts in. “Just eight.”

 

 

  
He texts her and tells her he has a new batch of kombucha for her, so she better come over to his new place and get it. She screencaps the text and sends it to Dany, asking Dany if she thinks that he is trying to convey that they are going to try and fuck each other after work tonight. Dany responds within five minutes, sardonically stating that she doesn’t think his text says anything about sex that at all. She thinks Grey’s text says that he has some kombucha ready for Missandei, and Missandei should go over and get her drinks.

She shows up with a glass vase full of pink roses. Because she thinks it’s cute, and it’s also a joke — it’s like a cute burn on him and how spazzy he is with romantic gestures.

She just about drops the vase when she gets a look at his new apartment. He lives in a small building near his parents’ house — so quieter and not as urban as where she lives. He can see trees from his windows, and his place has two bedrooms.

He also has the most _incredible shit —_ which she immediately starts looking at and carefully touching after she places the vase of flowers on his kitchen counter. Her breath is halting and stuttered as she squeaks out, “Oh my God, fancy.” Her hands run over his leather sofa before they run over his wood slab dining table. He has fucking _art_  on the walls. She has only known him as — in his words — an infantile loser who still lives with his mommy and daddy. She only knows him in the context of his tiny bedroom at his parents’ house, with the stuff he owned when he was eighteen years old. She says, “Oh my God, you’re an adult,” as she bends over and stares right into the face of a wolf figurine.

He says, “I got that in Winterfell,” reminding her that he used to travel a lot in his old job.

She takes a break from staring at his stuff to look at him — he is standing nervously in his living room. She closes one eye before squinting at him with the other. Beyond all of the t-shirts and sweatpants and baseball caps, she can also see him in glasses and suits. He is a dichotomy.

She tells him, “Okay, that vase I got you was too cheap.”

His face is blank as he says, “It’s fine. I can just throw it into the garbage after the flowers wilt.”

This makes her smile and laugh silently. She lightly holds onto her stomach. She boldly walks over to peek into his extra room — it’s an office, with a crazy computer setup. There are three monitors. Oh damn.

She peeks into his bedroom — all of his stuff is dark and beautifully textured. She groans at the site of his duvet cover and says, “Grey, are you _serious?”_

He’s like, “What?”

She says, “I like how your bed looks.”

That statement generally hangs in the air as he clears his throat and asks her if she’s hungry yet. She is, so she eagerly retreats from the bedroom to follow him back to the main room. There, he opens a bottle of organic wine with an old-school, corkscrew opener made of wood and metal. He has a thingie that cuts off the foil top. He uses a towel to hold onto the bottle as he efficiently cranks down the corkscrew and winches it out of the bottleneck. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him open a bottle of wine before. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen someone open a bottle of wine like such an adult before.

As she sips from her glass and watches him assemble plates of steak and roasted potatoes because — he tells her — he’s actually so fucking sick of seafood and fucking flamingo, as much as he loves the food from home. He tells her that he has been craving a fat slab of cow for days now, but he has waited for her before indulging.

He is really, really anxious — she can tell. He is probably nervous because she’s in the middle of all of his stuff — and that feels intimate. He is probably nervous because he no longer lives with his parents and the two of them are just in his new home by themselves, with lots of privacy. He is probably nervous because all of the rumors about him are actually true — he is a really cute, really bougie-ass hipster.

She doesn’t care. She is charmed by it all.

When she tries to kiss him, he turns his face away, so that her lips land on his cheek. It makes her ask, “Did you eat gluten today?”

He actually shakes his head and says, “No,” blearily. He doesn’t know why he turned his head either.

So she tries again. She puts her wine glass down on the countertop before she steps into his personal space. She winds a hand around the back of his neck. She turns off the stove on purpose. And then she plants her mouth on his. She touches her tongue to his. She gets nothing back from him for five whole seconds. And in those seconds, she just commits. She pulls him in closer. She inhales deeply, smelling garlic in the air. She also tastes it on him because he’s been cooking and adjusting for an hour before she arrived. She kisses him slowly and deliberately, taking slow breaks to swallow and to exhale.

Her balance tips when he starts kissing her back. She grasps onto the handle of the stove as his mouth collides back into hers, as his hand digs into the base of her spine, pressing her tighter against his body. He kisses her sexily, and it makes her feel relief — that they still have this, that it didn’t just evaporate into the thin, cool King’s Landing air.

She’s the one to first break away. She giggles and holds onto him as his hands run up and down her backside, briefly grabbing a hold of her butt. He moves his kisses her to neck as she presses her palm into his chest. She has to apply a fair bit of strength to push him back. He looks at her like she’s stupid — because she was the one who asked for this and started this.

She smiles at him. She tells him, “Later. You worked really hard on dinner.”

 

 

 

 


	45. Grey hates himself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey still can't relax enough to get dirty with the love of his life. He's actually low-key romantic and has an entire complex about it. Missandei just continues to be real chill with everything like the champ she is.

 

 

  
They eat dinner at his really expensive, really beautiful, really long table. She thought it would be funny for them to sit on opposite ends of it — so she places her wine glass and her plate at the south end while he seats himself north. She runs her fingers over the satin-smooth top of the slab table and shows off her limited furniture knowledge by saying, “Is this hand rubbed? It is, isn’t it? _Okay._ Damn.” And then after a pause, she blurts, “Are you rich? Like, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about how much money you must make — until _now_ — but are you rich, Grey? Is this why money is a point of contention between you and Azzie?”

He looks pretty tortured and a little ashamed — because his parents immigrated with absolutely nothing besides deep trauma in their minds and hearts. In contrast, he has easily coasted through life propped up on their hard work. This is why he feels shame. He feels really self-conscious about money. He initially says, “No, I’m not rich.” And then he feels like he sounds like a real privilege douchebag saying that, so he amends and he says, “Maybe I am — I don’t know.” And then he thinks about Dany and how she is probably legit old-money rich, not like him, who is new-rich — so he adds, “Isn’t it subjective?” And finally, he weakly says, “I’ve been able to save a lot of money ‘cause I lived with my parents for a year.”

She smiles at him softly. In response to this, she says, “I didn’t mean to make you go on an entire journey there. I was just saying it’s cool you’re so good at your job that your job pays you so much money to do . . . cyber security stuff. You’re like, at the top of your field, right?”

This makes him give her a strained smile. Because compliments are _the worst._

She grins as she gently tries to joke a little bit to alleviate his anxiety. She says, “I like how you’re rich, but you never hire people to help you around your parents’ house. I like how you labor like a poor person all the time.”

Okay, so this isn’t so much a joke as it just is the plain truth. She thinks it’s actually really sexy that he chops up trees, builds fences, and cleans out gutters even though he probably makes obscene money because he’s so freaking good at his job. She thinks it’s sexy that he spent an entire year living with his parents because he wanted to be closer to them — that he spent an entire year sleeping on a tiny twin bed when he could’ve been ballin' it up the entire time in a spacious apartment. She thinks it’s sexy that he chose an apartment building that he can jog to their house from. This kind of stuff is completely in line with what she’s about and her entire culture and belief system. She loves the lack of entitlement in him. She loves how hard he works. She loves how he is obsessive about doing things in the right way, versus the fastest way. She loves that he loves his family.

He is not getting this at all. He’s not understanding that she finds this stuff attractive in him. He thinks that he’s just being a real inefficient moron. He thinks that he is a control freak who is also really, really cheap, so he has real problems hiring people to help his parents even though it would help local small businesses. Plus, his dad is also incredibly picky and controlling and would have issues with letting just anyone into the house. His dad would also get uptight about Grey throwing money at a problem. His dad would call him a lazy fucker for it.

Grey realizes — in dread — for the millionth time in life — that he is just like his father. It’s so fucking gross because it means he doesn’t have the spine to like, even be his own person.

They eat in silence for a while.

And that’s when he has another private revelation. He realizes — in shock — that he made her like, a fancy dinner. He didn’t just make steak. He made steak that he’s been dry-aging in his fridge for like, half of the week. He made steak with a smoked sea salt. He cooked potatoes in duck fat. He like, made his own mustard.

And so every nice thing she says about dinner and the food and his new home just digs into him. All of her compliments just make him just hate himself so much, because he is excessive and he completely went overboard. He looks like he’s fucking crazy and worse yet — he looks like he is dripping in pretension, like he thinks he’s so great, like he thinks he’s better than other people.

This dinner is worse than the time he showed up at her apartment in a suit, with flowers. This is going to be remembered as the time she showed up to his elitist new apartment and was floored by all of his showy furniture, before he pulled out an expensive bottle of organic wine and presented food that he has spent days prepping and planning out — like a fucking white person.

“This is romantic,” she says. And at first, he can’t tell if she’s joking around or not. Then she says, “We should break out some candles. I bet you have votive holders made of crystal somewhere, huh?”

Oh, it’s totally a joke. She’s totally making fun of him. He says, “Pewter, actually.”

Her eyes widen in delight. She laughs around the rim of her wine glass, fogging it up as she says, “Oh! You have _antique_ candle holders. Okay! Okay!”

He miserably says, “I got them in Valyria.”

The thing is — what he keeps telling himself is that he’s just particular. He just likes knowing stuff about stuff. He honestly slowly accumulated his shit over the course of ten years. He didn’t just buy all of his shit all at once, but he sees now that it _feels_ that way, because his shit has been locked up in storage for the past year.

He also likes to nerd out on food and stuff. Because food is fun, and food is technical. His dad instilled a love of science in him — his dad also loves to cook. Grey just likes to dry-age steaks because _obviously_ that just has to be done, and he likes to fixate on temperature and cooking methods. He had duck fat lying around because she can’t eat butter. He made his own mustard because it’s not hard to — and also making it ensures that there’s no gluten in it.

The wine was a legit splurge. He hasn’t seen her all week. He has missed her. He wanted to buy her a nice wine and make her dinner because he wants to spend time with her, and he wants to make her happy. So fucking sue him for that.

And like, _it all made sense_ to him when he was alone and when he was dealing with things in bits and pieces. But now, he is getting hit in the face with the cumulative effect of it all. And he fucking _hates_ himself for being _this person._

He is glad he is wearing his ratty old clothes. At least he still has this going for him.

She groans as she chews into a puffy little potato piece. She tells him, “It’s so buttery. It like, tastes like it’s been cooked in butter. Are you sure there’s no butter in this? It is _so yummy.”_

“There’s no butter in it,” he says to her, just feeling sick over it all.

“I’m kidding,” she assures him, smiling from like, eight feet away because his stupid table is pointlessly long. “I know there’s not. You’re always so careful with my food. God, you’re so sweet. You’re just — so _cute_ and considerate. Oh my God, you’re just — _the best.”_

 

 

  
After dinner, she literally screams after she asks him where in the world his TV is, because how are they are going to have movie nights at his new pad if he doesn’t have a TV? She screams because he silently walks over and slides this fancy white screen over his bookshelves, exposing what’s on the wall behind it.

It’s a TV. This is actually new. He actually bought this TV a few days ago. He specifically thought about her and movie nights when he bought it. It is super high def.

He just fucking hates himself so hard right now.

She runs over to look at the mechanism, marveling over it. He tells her he built the thing himself a few years ago. Because he hates the look of TVs on walls. He thinks TVs on walls are a little tacky-looking. She ignores his explanation because she figured as much. She just grabs ahold of his forearm — bracing herself — as she tells him to turn on the TV.

It is voice activated.

When he reluctantly tells the TV to turn itself on — and it does — Missandei is jumping up and down in place, giggling like a loon. She is repetitively saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God, I love it! I love it! Do it again! Do it again!”

It takes her long minutes before she calms down. She has him play some music from his voice-activated speakers, as his TV goes into fancy standby mode — this alive-looking overhead view of the city during daytime. He doesn’t know what music to play that doesn’t seem so like, in tune with their environment — so he puts on trap music.

It makes her cackle as she collapses on the couch, rolling back and forth on her sides. He cannot believe she is so entertained by this shit.

After she settles herself on his sofa, she smells it. It’s not the kind of leather that her sofa is made of — it’s not overly processed and dyed leather. His couch is like, mottled and creased and discolored in spots — and shaped into precise, clean lines. It is like, the kind of couch that gets maintained — one that gets recushioned by a professional every now and then.

She tells him his sofa smells like an animal died for art. She also unwraps the colorful blanket at the end of his couch and pulls it across her lap, examining the knitting.

He feels like a real dildo as he tells her, “I got that in Braavos, actually. When I was twenty-one. It was after my dad met me and Drogo at the embassy to yell at us for getting robbed.” He is tempted to tell her that the blanket was really cheap. He was a poor student. It is made from llama hair.

He doesn’t tell her that it’s really cheap because he doesn’t want to continue coming across like he is _trying so hard_ to rectify the damage that has already been done.

She can see that he is mentally freaking out. It’s easy for her to detect this in other people because it features so strongly in herself. She optimistically assumes that he is freaked by the newness of the situation — and not by her. She casually tells him, “This apartment is a real chick magnet.”

He’s standing in front of her, awkwardly. He rubs the back of his neck as he says, “Yeah? You think so?”

“Yeah, I’m into it,” she says. “And I’m a chick. I’m your chick.” She flips over a flap of the blanket, exposing a leg and a swatch of his sofa. She tells him, “Come here. I wanna fool around with you.” She reaches out for him.

And he is not smooth at all, as he responds to her heavy stare by hurriedly telling her that he needs to clean up in the kitchen, that he can’t let food sit out at room temp for too long.

She’s about to tell him — in confusion — that he usually does not give even one shit about food that is held at room temperature for too long. She’s about to tell him that she is usually the one who has to slap spoiling food out his hand because no, he shouldn’t eat _around_ the mold.

She watches in stunned surprise as he rushes in the general direction of the kitchen to put leftover beef into plastic containers, as he generally wipes down his cast iron skillet. She just watches him as he generally runs the fuck away from her and her come-hither looks. She is left reclining on the couch looking just shocked and emotionally whiplashed.

She blinks hard once, before she pushes herself up and slowly makes her way into the kitchen, taking a detour at the dining table to pick up her half-finished glass of wine.

She watches his back as he scrapes the rest of the potatoes into a container. She says, “Is everything okay?”

He says, “Yes,” like a total fucking liar.

So she takes a sip of her wine as she simply says, “You are totally losing your mind so hard right now.” Her words make him go rigid — as if he had some illusion that he was hiding his anxiety well. This makes her smile a little bit. Then she asks him, “Why? What’s been going on, Grey? It’s been like this for a while. We had a really amazing few days together in the Summer Isles — and then it all suddenly changed. What happened?”

He doesn’t answer her right away. He actually hesitates.

So she fills in the blank for him.

She says, “Is it because I told you I love you?”

In response to this, he winces — as he turns around to face her. And then he says, “Yes. Kinda.”

 

 

  
He’s vigorously cleaning his pots and pans because he needs something to do — something to distract a little bit of his mind from this conversation — as he tells her he felt their relationship was going great when he thought she was going to have to be cajoled, bullied, and begged into having sex with him the one day a year that she slums it enough to have sex with him. Like, he was kind of getting used to the idea of a relationship mostly devoid of sex. He was kind of getting on board with it, as it simultaneously made him upset and angry and sad and stuff.

He gestures to her — accusingly. He tells her that she switched it up on him all fucking randomly. She started getting all bold and taking off her clothes around him and putting her tits all up in his face — just all flagrantly like she doesn’t know what it looks like or how it feels to him. She started talking like sex is a done deal — an inevitability — for the both of them. And then she told him that she loves him.

He tells her that he’s actually a cesspool of emotion. He gestures to his entire apartment and also the vestiges of dinner. He tells her not to believe the fucking hype — he’s actually really _sensitive_ and _sentimental._ All of his shit means something to him, and he gets attached to things and to people all the time.

As he shoves his pans underneath soapy water, he aggressively tells her, “I’m a fucking _weak bitch._ I’m a fucking _bag of emotions_ during sex.”

She’s trying to follow along. She’s trying not to trigger him by saying something offensive or concerning to him — like how she thinks he’s being _utterly batshit_ and self-sabotaging right now. She is methodical as she lays down the truth. She finds that it has become easier and easier to be direct with people — the longer that she is with him because that’s what he shines at her face — constantly. She shakes her head, and she says to him, “Grey, you honestly just said a bunch of really nice things just now. So I’m confused. I think your apartment is great. It’s so great that it’s _so you._ It has stuff from all the places you have been. And dinner was amazing and so thoughtful and just so sweet and lovely. And I — it honestly sounds really nice that you are emotional during sex. I would rather you be emotional with me than like, robotic and unfeeling? I _want_ you to be emotional with me. And I thought you _wanted_ sex? So I’m sorry — I just don’t understand why all of this stuff upsets you.”

He is just losing his grip on his point right now. He’s grasping at straws as he says, “I just didn’t expect our relationship to progress like this — it’s just happening so fast.” And he shuts his eyes the second the words come out his mouth.

As predicted, she corrects him. She says, “Um, get it straight, it has not been fast.” Her eyes are going wide in disbelief. “It took _forever_ for us to become friends. It took _forever_ for us to start dating. It took _forever_ for us to kiss. And it’s taking _forever_ for us to sleep together! Like, babe, I don’t think you have a clear picture of the passage of time here.”

“Okay, don’t try to be funny right now,” he says sullenly, with his voice low. “Your hilarity makes me feel like a _fucking tool._ And this is _exactly_ why I didn’t want to say this stuff out loud. Because I’m saying it out loud, and I sound fucking _crazy._ I sound crazy _like you_ and not like how I usually sound — which is _rational.”_

“Oh, so you can have jokes but I can’t?” she asks rhetorically. “That’s not very fair, Torgo Nudho.”

He flinches when she says his real name — with the right accent and everything. He feels like she said it that way on purpose because _of course_ it’s on purpose.

He says, “Missandei, I’m telling you. I get really weird when I feel intensely uncomfortable. Look _through_ the bravado. I’m fucking terrified right now ‘cause I’ve been imagining what it’s gonna be like when I take my pants off in front of you, okay?”

And just like that — her tense body relaxes and she lets out a clean and easy sigh. With that admission, she just understands what his current anxieties are. She understands why he ran away from her on the couch. She understands why he thinks their relationship is progressing fast even though it is clearly not.

And she just melts at this — her entire face softens, and she just starts looking at him like he’s a wounded little puppy — which is _exactly_ what he was anticipating and dreading.

She stops herself from running to him and smothering him in hugs and kisses and reassurances. She stays rooted to her spot, and she says, “Aw! Don’t be scared. It’ll be okay!” And then more gently, she softly repeats, “We’ll be _okay,_ Grey. We’re in this _together,_ babe.”

“Okay, fuck you,” he says. “We’re _not._ They are _my pants._ It’s _my junk._ We’re _not_ going to be okay _at all.”_ And _what_ is he even _saying_ right now? He does not even know what fucking _point_ is he trying to _argue_ right now.

“Grey, don’t say ‘fuck you’ to me,” she says. And then she smiles. “Not unless you _mean it.”_

He shakes his head in disbelief — because how is this his problem right now? He sighs before he says, “Missandei —” Then he pauses.

She says, “Yes?”

 

 

 

 


	46. Missy tries to explain she's DTF

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These two nerds end up spiraling down an anxiety hole together — it's romantic! Missy is worried that her hot body will somehow be repulsive to the love of her life. The love of her life is worried that he will never ever be able to satisfy his woman because he has no dick. However! They do bond over their mutual fear of being bad at sex!

 

 

  
She tells him getting naked together is not even going to be a big deal — because she’s been priming herself for this. And then she immediately points at him and tells him not to freak out. She doesn’t mean priming like she has to like, prepare for something she doesn’t want to do. She means priming like she’s an Olympic athlete about to run the race of her life. Except she’s not athletic at all so she might not even know what she’s talking about here.

Upon noticing his really tense stare, she quickly moves on. She quickly tells him that she’s done _a lot_ of mental walk-throughs, _a lot_ of mental practice. She has been taking inventory of his pants for instance — all of his different pants styles — his sweats with the drawstrings, his boxers with the elastic, his jeans with the buttons, his jeans with the snaps, his zippers, his slacks, his basketball shorts — she has been paying attention to all of it. She is pretty confident she can extract him from his pants with minimal incident.

He says, “Oh God,” because it is a little mortifying that this person has been paying so much attention to his pants and has been thinking so hard about what’s under his pants.

“It’s okay, Grey!” she says cheerfully. “Don’t worry about it! We’ve got _this!”_

She then tells him she’s been looking at a lot of pictures of men without penises on the internet — and at this point, Grey loudly goes, _“Oh my God, kill me now!”_ She has to shush him and tell him that because she’s been looking at pictures and watching some videos, she generally has a pretty solid idea of what she’s going to encounter in his pants.

He says, “Videos? Like, are you talking about really niche porn?”

“Oh, no. Ew,” she says. Then she pauses. She says, “I don’t mean ew like men without penises are ew. And I don’t mean ew like sex is ew. I mean ew like porn is ew. And I don’t think porn is ew because people are having sex on camera. People should do what they want. It’s just that porn is really male-oriented, and it just grosses me out because it’s usually so sexist and —”

“Okay, thanks for explaining the shit out of this,” he says, interrupting. His face is grim. “It makes me feel really fragile because you are working so hard not to hurt my feelings.”

“Grey —”

“I know,” he says, grunting in annoyance at himself. “I know I’m being so _defensive_ and _guarded_ right now.”

She frowns. She says, “Babe, I don’t care that you’re defensive. I know it’s hard —”

“Will you _stop_ being so understanding!” he suddenly snaps. And then he immediately backtracks. He shuts his eyes again as he internally reams himself for the outburst. He reminds himself that he’s such an idiot and that he actually has no fucking problems in life. Then he opens his eyes. Then he says, “I’m so sorry for raising my voice. You didn’t do anything to warrant that.”

“Would you rather I was mean to you?” she asks softly. She is actually really asking. She is actually really curious.

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice also very quiet now — to ensure that he doesn’t accidentally yell again.

She’s remembering the last time he was upset with her. She had said something carelessly rude about him — _to him._ He ended up distancing himself from her to deal with it. She worked overtime to make it up to him. He didn’t let himself believe in the genuineness of her feelings for him, so he kept trying to avoid it. When he couldn’t avoid it, he straight up antagonistically rejected it.

This is a pattern. She sees it better now.

She says, “I’m not going to be mean to you. I don’t want to be mean to you.”

He digs the heels of his hands against his closed eyelids. He pretty much covers his face as he tells her, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m still a little messed up. I’m sorry you have to deal with it.”

 

 

  
She opens his cabinets in search of water glasses. It takes her four tries before she finds them. She fills up two cups with ice and filtered water. She hands one over to him, taking care to keep her distance from him, because he does not respond well to touching when he is like this. He interprets touching as coddling. And he interprets coddling as a statement of his supposed weakness. He is right — he is a little bit messed up. And in her point of view, it is not his fault. This is a combination of his injury and also how he was raised by his parents.

She drinks the cold water as she tells him that she really can’t predict what emotional response she will have when she sees his injury, so she can’t promise him she’ll be down to have sex right away. But she has certainly Googled a lot of pictures, so she’s pretty sure she won’t be shocked. She is pretty sure she generally knows what he looks like. She tells him this because honesty soothes him, another byproduct of his upbringing.

She tells him that he’s definitely more than just a picture or an image or state of being. He’s an entire person with a past and with history and with experiences. It’s possible that when she sees him, she will get very sad because she will think about him lying in his bed and being so scared and in such pain when he was just a young and bright little boy. Like, she might get struck by that and just start crying.

Or maybe she will get a little scared because sex is scary. Sex is really scary when a person hasn’t done it in fifteen years. Maybe she’ll be struck with performance anxiety.

But, she assures him, she will probably be down to have sex at some point in the following three hours — most likely.

She tells him, “I have thought about this _a lot_ lately.”

He says, “Yeah, I can tell.”

She tells him about her poop worries — because she has _so many_ poop worries that come from so many years of being sick and not being able to trust her body at all. She also tells him about her vagina-related fears — just so that he doesn't have to be alone in how vulnerable he feels. She tells him that she’s scared that her body will gross him out. Probably not the look of it — but the hidden mechanics of it — or the way she moves it. She _does_ know that her worries are completely irrational, just like he must know that his constant self-protection against someone who _loves him_ and who just wants to _be with him_ is just completely nonsensical. But she also knows that the human brain is just so tricky sometimes. She tells him that she’s scared he won’t love her anymore — when she accidentally shits on him during sex.

In a daze, he’s shaking his head as he says, “God, Missandei. Stop worrying about that. You’re not going to poop on me —”

“I _could,”_ she insists.

“— and I’m sure your vagina is beautiful and smells fine.”

Both of them simultaneously groan in pain at that — in pain and mortification. She’s embarrassed that he has to reassure her about her vagina before even seeing it. He’s embarrassed that he is so presumptuous about her vagina.

It is _crazy_ to the both of them, that they are talking about this.

He just bites the bullet after that — because this probably cannot get much worse.

He ends up asking her if she thinks she actually wants to have sex with him, or if she has just become comfortable enough with the idea of it because it’s what he wants and she loves him, so she just wants him to be happy.

Honestly, either option is completely fine with him — he doesn't know why the fuck he is bracing himself so hard for the answer to this.

She says, “Both.” She says, “I want to do it because I want you to be happy. Of course I want you to be happy. I also want to do it just to see what it feels like because everything else so far has felt really nice. And I want to do it because I want to see you naked, and I don’t think you will let me see you naked without sex being a strong element of things.”

He sinks his face into his palms. He is holding his head in both of his hands because he was wrong. His bougie apartment and the fancy dinner wasn’t the worst. _This_ is actually the fucking _worst._ It sounds like she is going to have sex with him because he is pitiful, not because she’s hot for his body. Which — really — he should just cut his losses because he’s not sure there’s anything she can say that he will believe, that he will be okay with. He doesn’t think there’s anything she can say that will make him feel better. He is just fucking _losing his mind_ right now and just being _ridiculous._

Right now, she is thinking that she has underestimated his feelings. It’s just — he projects so much confidence and so much don’t-give-a-fuck-ness. He typically seems so bulletproof and so over what happened to him. He usually seems so far ahead of her, in terms of anxiety and his mental health.

So she is emboldened enough to just say, “Seriously, Grey — how are we going to have sex? And I don’t mean euphemistically. I seriously mean like — where is your mouth and where are your hands physically _going to go?”_

He is shaking his head. His face is still buried in his hands. His voice is muffled as he says, “I think I’m probably going to try and go down on you. _Try_ is the operative word here.”

Okay, so — so she was actually really confident that this is the game plan — like, nearly one-hundred percent sure that this is what is going to happen to her. It’s just logical. And she has talked it out with Dany. Dany agreed. That this is probably what’s going to happen to Missy unless Grey unexpectedly is just terrible and selfish in bed and refuses to eat her out because he’s such an asshole about it. Dany says that outcome is unlikely — but she planted the mind-melting seed in Missandei’s brain nonetheless. Missy’s been abstractly worried that he is selfish in bed and that would be something she’d have to deal with. She is also worried that — due to her inexperience — she might be selfish in bed and not even know it — and that would be something that they’d have to deal with.

Being confronted with the denial of the terribleness doesn’t really comfort her that much. Missy still squeaks out this elongated whine as she drops her body down to his kitchen counter when it gets confirmed — that he plans to go down on her. Now she’s covering her face, too. They are both completely ridiculous. And being really immature about this. The counter is cold, but her heavy, nervous breathing warms it up fast. She reaches her fist out and she lightly punches down on the smooth top of the surface. Because the idea of his face in between her legs is like — incredibly personal and intimate. And mortifying. And scary. And he said try, so clearly he is feeling really fucking confident and sure about this, too.

He has raised his face. He is despondently watching her wrestle with her emotions — and the countertop. He says, “I mean, we don’t have to. That was just what I figured would happen —”

“No, no. It’s fine,” she says quickly, pushing herself back up so she can look at him. “I’m like —” She clears her throat. “I’m on board. I’m down to _try.”_

“I like how enthusiastic we both are about this,” he says. He is shaking his head.

“I’m not averse to it!” she says, kind of in a panic. She’s panicked because she sounds like she’s trying too hard again — and she knows he hates it when she tries too hard to placate him because he is _psychotic._ “I’m interested! It’s just — ” She spontaneously shivers. She groans. She holds her hands together, like in prayer. She grinds out, “It’s just that your face is going to be _in there.”_

“Yeah, I know right?” he says. He’s glowering right now. “It would be great if I had a dick to mindlessly put up in there. But I _don’t._ So it is going to be harder. For both of us.”

“Grey,” she says, sighing now. “Don’t say that.”

He shrugs. It is the truth.

She says, “I don’t need or want a penis.” She full-on stops herself from saying that she just wants him. Because it’s too corny and cutesy and he will _cram her face_ into the sentimentality.

He plainly says, “You don’t know what you want. You’ve only had sex with one person. When you were a child.”

“Okay, that’s hilarious,” she says — not laughing at all. “Thanks for the reminder. And thanks for being dismissive. Thanks for telling me what I want and how I feel.” And then, after a short pause, she tersely says, “Are we about to have a fight about this? Because I don’t want to freaking have a fight with you. So if you’re going to start being an asshole to me, just tell me. So I can fucking _go home.”_

 

 

  
He has to go pee. He announces it to her — and he’s tempted to joke about it and tell her that she can come and watch him pee if she wants to — so that they can rip off this band aid in the unsexiest way ever. It seems like a really auspicious way to fucking set sex in motion.

He refrains from cracking the “joke” though, because she has asked him to cool it and control his temper. She has asked him to not be a flaming asshole to her — which, honestly — it is _ridiculous_ that she has to explicitly ask this from him. He is such a fucking shithead.

So he goes pee silently, by himself. He washes his hands and kind of messily dries them on his shirt. She’s sitting on the couch when he walks out. She has transferred their glasses of water onto the coffee table. She is using his coasters. She’s really just the fucking best thing ever — the best person ever.

He collapses on the other side of the sofa with a sigh. He tells her, “I’m sorry. I’m going to be nicer to you. I’m sorry.”

She says, “I know you are feeling really raw and thus, really defensive and aggressive. I get it. But you don’t have to like, protect yourself from me. Let’s just talk.” She leans forward to toss a little bit of his llama blanket over his lap.

“Okay,” he says, pulling the flap over his legs. The blanket is stretched taut because they are sitting far apart.

“So — you’re going to put your mouth on my vagina,” she says, with an air of fake indifference. “That’s cool. I’m looking forward to it.”

He’s rubbing the top of his head. Her forcefully casual tone as she talks about oral sex so transparently is a bit of a trip. He says, “Yep. Same.”

Then her voice suddenly reverts to its worried tone — because she accidentally imagines how weird and awkward she’s going to look in the middle of the act. She anxiously asks, “But what if I’m on my period when we do it, and I’m just hemorrhaging out of my vagina?” And then before he can respond to this, she figures it out for herself. She actually might already have all of the answers in herself. If she would just use her freaking brain. She says, “Ah, I’m being stupid. I already know the answer. We can schedule _this._ Or around this. Like, I know when I’m due for some smelly, mucus-y hemorrhaging. Or — I guess can put a tampon in and plug it up.” She clears her throat again. “If you are okay with that, that is.” And then she nervously guzzles down the rest of her ice water.

As she’s doing that, his voice is simple and clear as he says, “Yeah, I’d be fine with that.”

“Oh my God,” she says, making a mental note — that he will go down on her when she’s on her period, provided that she shoves a heavy-duty tampon up there so he doesn’t get splashed in the face with clotted blood. This is just awesome new knowledge about him that she has now.

She then asks, “Do you prefer a specific kind of like . . . grooming down there? I want to make this easier for you.”

He shrugs. He honestly doesn't have much of a preference here. He says, “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

She says, “Um, I’m going to be uncomfortable and self-conscious no matter what because I’m so inexperienced — like you said — so you should just state your preference. And I can try and make it happen.”

He’s trying to keep his voice light and really fun, as he says, “This sounds like it’s going to be really amazing and like nothing is going to go weird.” He’s trying to keep his sense of humor about this intact — and not let it get too bitter. It is kind of hard. He is realizing that his sense of humor is just so dark. He exhales audibly and then says, “Maybe trim a little down there? Maybe splash a little water and perfume on it before I start? _No,_ I am fucking _joking,_ Missandei. Don’t actually do that. Perfume tastes gross.”

She smiles — it’s a little bit weak, but it’s there. She says, “Okay, I can trim for you. I can get it nice and neat and pretty for you.”  
  
“Thanks.”

After she finishes her entire glass of water, she has nothing to do, so she’s eyeing his glass — because he has not touched it at all. She says, “So you’re right. I was only sexually active as a child, so I’ve never done oral before. Is that how you say it? Do you do oral? Do you have it done to you?”

And then because she’s just on a major roll, she admits to him that she’s never had an orgasm during sex — by another person’s hand. Or even by her own hand in front of another person. She’s actually never had an orgasm during sex period, just in masturbation. And that’s not like, it’s not a challenge or a call to arms. That is just . . . a fact . . . that she is letting him know. She tells him no pressure. She doesn’t care. And then she quickly corrects, and she says she _does care._ Like, she wants him to care about orgasms. But not to the point where it like, psyches him out.

She’s having a hard time watching his face as she is saying _all of this shit,_ so she cannot currently gauge his response to any of it. She just goes for broke because she has decided that more information is better than less information. She tells him that she’s never even done very much sex with her shirt off because she and her ex were children, so they were always super scared of getting caught by adults, like his parents or, worse yet, _her parents._ She tells him that she’s not very experienced in sexual positions. She knows like, one. She’s never been on top. She’s never done it above the covers. She’s never even done it for more than like, five or ten minutes at a time. She’s only practiced in like, hand jobs. Because hand jobs were her currency when she was a child. They were how she deferred sex for so long.

She tells him that it’s been a really, really long time since she’s given a hand job though. She tells him that she imagines it will be different with him, and she’ll actually be starting from square one.

Honestly, all of the information is making him go crazy. All of the information just keeps piling on itself, making the pressure of sex immense and choking and insurmountable. He’s thinking that he _can’t_ possibly be in charge of this woman’s sexual awakening. He is not even _equipped for this._

So, in response to _all of this verbal diarrhea,_ he blurts, “What happens if the sex is really terrible?”

Her jaw drops. Her eyes go wide. And then her body goes rigid with alertness. She sits up straight and bounces around on the cushion, trying to face him better. She eagerly says, “Oh man, I know! I worry about that, too!”

“Are we going to have to break up?” he asks her.

“I don’t want to,” she whines, just in pain over this. “Because I _love you.”_

“I love you, too,” he says, equally as tortured. “I really don’t want to break up.”

“Grey!” she says, twisting around in place uncomfortably. “I really hope it’s not terrible! I don’t want to break up! I want to stay _together!”_

 

 

 


	47. Missy sleeps over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy sleeps over at Grey's new apartment. He asks her if she wants to have sex. She says no. Then later, she asks him if he wants to have sex. He says no. Which goes to show it's not what you say, but how you say it!

 

 

  
She interrupts the flow of the conversation to also get up to go pee. When she comes back out, she heads straight to the kitchen, opening up his fridge to grab leftovers. He has cut up steak so that he can top veggies and salads for lunch, but she takes out the plastic container and starts picking off meat pieces with her fingers, shoving them into her mouth.

From the couch, he asks her how she can possible be hungry again. She has to tell him that she’s not. She’s actually comfort-eating right now. She asks him if there is any wine left.

He gets up to pour her another glass. He has to crack open a fresh bottle, which — when she sees this, she tries to backtrack and tell him she’s totally fine and he doesn’t have to open a new bottle just for her. He’s already got the foil cut off and he’s already twisting the corkscrew into the cork as he smoothly tells her it’s cool. Wine is meant to be enjoyed. He also bought this wine specifically for her. He tells her it is a cheaper organic red wine than the one they had for dinner. As he pours her a fresh glass, she confesses to him that she's not the biggest connoisseur. She can’t really tell the difference between good and great wines, only between shit and good wines. She starts washing down the beef with the booze, drinking it like it’s Kool-Aid or something.

He laughs as he watches her. His fingertips touches her back, before he full-on lays his palm on her spine. She can feel the heat from the touch through her thin blouse. He sniffs her cheek before he kisses it, as she is quickly chewing through beef. He’s thinking that she’s such an adorable little weirdo. He’s thinking that there is just no one else like her. He’s thinking that she is probably right — everything is probably going to be just fine.

Into her ear, he asks, “Do you want to . . . try sex tonight? Maybe get some of it over with?”

She shakes her head vigorously. She says, “No, not tonight. I want to watch TV on your couch first. And I want to have the snuggles and smoochies in your fancy bed. I want to do a bunch of things in your new apartment before we attempt sex and then have to break up because it’s so bad.”

“Okay,” he says softly, turning her body around for a backwards hug. “Okay. Makes sense,” he says, wrapping his arms around her, around her midsection. She feels her ribs compress a little bit. She feels his hand come up to rest on her stomach. She feels the tip of his nose gently nudging her head. She tilts it, so that he has easy access to her bare neck.

His lips are pressing soft kisses into her skin as she reaches up and pats his face with her beefy hands. She coyly says, “I said I want the snuggles and the smoochies in bed, not in the kitchen.”

He says, “Okay. Do you want to go to bed?” breathing hot, moist air onto her skin, pulling out goosebumps.

She eyes the clock on his stove. It is nine-thirty. She pretends to think about it, as his kisses get wetter and become more substantial. The answer is obviously yes, she wants to go to bed with him. Out loud, she says, “I don’t have any clothes here.”

“You won’t be needing clothes,” he says — and it _does_ sound hot. But it also sounds really dry and deadpan. He chuckles. He says, “Is that the line? Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

He lets her go then — so that he can put away the beef container again and stop up the open bottle of wine. He asks her if she is going to finish the glass that she asked him to pour because she likes to anxiety-drink. She shakes her head bashfully to convey no, she can’t finish her wine. He ends up picking up the glass and quickly gulping down the rest of its contents — so the wine doesn’t go to waste. He rinses out the glass and places it into the sink.

She decides to sleep over, even though she is not prepared for it, even though she didn’t intend on it when they made dinner plans. If she had, she would’ve packed a change of clothes and some toiletries. It’s just that — she’s never had to think about this before. He has lived with his parents the entire time that she has known him. Sleeping over at his place was never an option for her because his bed was tiny and also, it just seemed really weird to sleep over at his parents’ house.

In his bedroom-bathroom, he pulls a new toothbrush head out of a drawer. It’s a head because he has upgraded to a Sonicare. Because he is such a bougie bitch and all. He bashfully tells her that he like, thought about this a little bit and he was presumptuous and like — prepared for her? He has like, lotions, shampoos, conditioners, body wash, and even like, a silk headscarf, scrunchies, and other sorts of hair ties. Like, he doesn’t know much about women’s hair stuff — so he asked his fucking mother. And his freaking mom told him to buy all of this stuff for her. He is suddenly struck with a lot of self-consciousness — because he realizes just how fucking _invested_ and _insane_ he sounds right now. He says, “Oh shit. I just realized that I asked my fucking _mommy_ for advice on what to do to make a woman feel comfortable sleeping over. That is fucking  _amazing.”_ He’s shaking his head in disbelief. He says, “This is really sexy, right? This is a huge turn on for you, right?”

She doesn’t answer him. Because her mouth is too preoccupied with beaming just the biggest, most _massive_ smile at him.

He gives her a pair of his boxers and a comfy t-shirt before he throws her pants, bra, and blouse into the wash with the rest of his laundry. She leaves her panties on. She’s standing around watching him, with her legs bare, as she observes that it reminds her of how he was constantly washing their clothes in the Summer Isles.

In bed, he faces her and tucks his arm underneath his pillow. His other hand is softly caressing her cheek. He tells her that it’s still tripping him up — her being in bed with him. His voice is so reflective, and it’s plaintive enough that she has to push down this gurgle of emotion — so that she doesn’t start randomly crying like a blubbering idiot. She says, “I know how you feel.”

They talk a little bit more about sex. She asks him about his sexual experience — because it seems like, more comprehensive than hers. He tries to shrug off this old pain, as he tells her that like anyone else, he’s had good experiences and he’s had bad experiences. He realizes he isn’t being forthcoming enough, so he explains. He asks her if she knows that sad girl at high school parties who gives out blow jobs for free because she is just so broken inside and just wants someone to love her.

It’s a rhetorical question, but Missandei still says, “Yes?” with uncertainty. It is uncertain because she actually never went to any parties after puberty. Because her parents thought she was going to get raped at a party.

He says, “I was that girl. I was the sad girl who gave blow jobs away for free. Except my deal was I was a hormonal teenage boy who was desperate to prove that he was a man. So I generally took a bunch of drugs, got way wasted, behaved like an asshole so that girls would think I was hot, and then I’d hook up with someone I didn’t know — in an unfamiliar house.” Upon her questioning look, he says, “This stuff generally happened outside our circle of friends. Because everyone in our high school knew about my situation. And you know Drogo — he’s so friendly and everyone likes him. He’s always had a lot of friends in many different circles. So . . . he used to take me these parties. I never took off my clothes, and I never let anyone touch me — so like, the girls — they never knew. And that made me feel okay?”

He’s trailing off — because suddenly, things just feel _awkward_ — in the sense that things suddenly feel heavy and serious. He generally rushes through the next bits. He tells her that teenage boys are the worst, trying to de-emphasize his own kinda-victimhood because it gives him such a complex as it also leans a little too heavily into disingenuousness. He tells her that they kind of made a game of it — he and Drogo did. And yeah, that was it. He did a lot of stupid shit before he got really okay with the penis thing. Mostly. Mostly. He tells her that obviously — he still has some issues. But honestly, it’s not as bad as it used to be. Like, he’s pretty good about it all now.

To his own ears, he sounds like he’s trying too hard to sound okay.

She’s staring at him with a slight frown on her face. She is coming to a realization. She says, “So this is why your dad and brother do not like Drogo. And this is why your dad kinda get intense when he sees you get sloppy-drunk.”

“Maybe,” he says — again — trying to de-emphasize it all. And then he fixes it. He corrects himself and says, “Actually, yeah. That is why. But Drogo was like — he was constantly _there,_ though. He was like, living through my life with me. It’s easy for other people to judge him for his mindset — when he was just a kid himself. And like, I went along with it. I made the bad decisions. Drogo didn’t like, force me to do anything.” And then Grey clears his throat. He tries to sound flippant and casual as he says, “Anyway, my second and last stint of being a real slut was right after college, right after Alayaya and I broke up. That kind of messed me up. So I spiraled a little bit.” And then after a pause — he sighs. He says, “Actually, it messed me up a lot. And I spiraled a lot.”

He tells her that he and his dad stopped talking for a while — because of the medical school thing and also because he was being a real jackass to his parents at that point, just blaming them for everything that was wrong in his life.

Then he fixed himself. He started taking better care of himself and his mental health. He made up with his parents. He’s been really locked down ever since. He’s been very forceful and deliberate about everything — really controlled. He hasn’t had much sex since. Because he started being pretty upfront with women. And beyond the occasional odd person who fetishizes him and is really into genital amputation, most women are generally like, no thanks — when they learn about the penis thing.

The long silence that ensues signals to her that that’s the end of his story — he’s not going to flesh out many more details right now, which is good.

Because she already feels like _the biggest asshole on the planet._ She is replaying key moments in their relationship. She is replaying all of their arguments. She is remembering what he said to her, when he was trying to dissuade her from dating him. She is also remembering all of the fucking things she said to other people — like Yara, her therapist, Dany, Drogo, Irri — all of their friends — when she was in the midst of being just a _fucking moron_ about dealing with her attraction to him. She is remembering all of the times she told _other people_ that she does not want to fuck him. She remembers trying to be a heroic martyr about it — telling people that it’s nothing against Grey, but it’s really just her own hang-ups with her body. She was lying. To herself. And to everyone else. She was, _for sure,_ scared and turned off by the penis thing. He has known this about her from the get-go. He has been annoyed with her avoidance of the truth. She gets it now. Because it is definitely annoying. A lot of things just make more sense now.

In the silence, she sneaks her hands underneath his shirt, to run them up and down his chest and stomach. She likes the feel of his body. She likes his abs. She likes how he clenches when she touches him in these spots.

To him, she says, “Baby. Let’s just have sex tonight. I want to.”

History is cyclical. She has a terrible habit of overcorrecting. Her habit is bad enough that she once took off her clothes in front of him and offered him her body — because she felt bad about hurting him.

He knows this about her. This is why he grabs onto her hands underneath his shirt. He holds onto them tightly. This is why he says, “No, you _nut,”_ as he extracts and pulls her hands up to his mouth. He kisses her knuckles to lessen the sting. “I’m sure your vagina is great, but it is not so powerful that it can erase shit that has happened to me before we met.”

 

 

  
It’s harder than normal to wake up for work, for two reasons. It’s just hard to rip herself away from him before she’s ready to. Also — they are little sleep deprived because they stayed up way too late making out and doing some PG groping in his very nice bed. When his alarm blares, she rolls over, groans in frustration, and throws her arm over her face.

He has to roll over her to shut off his alarm. He ends up collapsing right on top of her after the sound is off, nuzzling his face into the crook of her neck, throwing a leg over both of hers. His hand softly lands on her warm stomach before it curves around her hip and he hugs her tightly, with his entire body.

This shit is just _amazing._ This is what she sleepily thinks to herself. She also dopily thinks that she has a _boyfriend._ And she’s _in bed_ with him.

She gets about five minutes of cuddling before he spontaneously pushes himself off of her and rolls out of the bed. She watches him as he stretches, as he runs his hand over his face, trying to rub the tiredness out of his head. He asks her if she wants to go and pee real fast, because he’s about to take a dump.

This makes her snort out a small, unexpected laugh. She feels him playfully swat at her butt as she scurries out of bed to run into the bathroom.

She generally sits on the toilet and has a long pee — as she buries her mouth in her fists. She is internally screaming. Her mind is screaming out in disbelief and in happiness — because she never thought she’d ever have this. She never thought she’d feel this way about another person. She didn’t know it could be so _immense_ and so _deep._ She didn’t ever think she would fall in love _so hard._ She didn’t know it would feel like _this._

After she finishes brushing her teeth, she tries to be like, ultra cool about being in his space as she exits the bathroom. He’s leaning against the opposite wall, waiting patiently when she opens the door.

She thinks this image of him is just the very best thing. She smiles at him brightly as they trade places. She hears him turn on the fan as he shuts the door behind him.

It’s really fast for her to get dressed. She doesn’t want to wear her blouse again even though it’s clean because there will be a coworker who points out that she’s wearing the same exact thing she wore the day before. So she slides one of his soft tees over her head — he averts his eyes to give her privacy — and she generally sits around and absorbs all of the sights as he changes into a suit in front of her. She watches his effort — because this is not at all natural for him — as he strips off the shirt he slept in and then plucks a dress shirt off a hanger. He tries to distract himself from the self-consciousness of dressing himself in front of her, so he tells her he has a shit ton of fucking meetings today. He is trying to grumble properly about it.

She is not contributing much to the conversation at all — she’s too busy staring at his body.

He tries to get her to help him pick out a tie. She absently tells him, “The left one,” as she just continues smiling softly at him, as he tries to tie his tie in a real hurry. He’s so flustered by her adoring gaze that he actually messes up — even though he does this shit, seriously, _all the time._ He has to undo and the redo his freaking tie like he’s some idiot.

She doesn’t even realize she is dawdling, and it causing the both of them to run a little late — not until Grey picks up her phone from the nightstand and says, “Miss — your phone is ringing, babe.” Her phone is on vibrate, so he actually means that her phone is buzzing.

She has the end of his tie clenched in her hand as she takes her phone from him. She’s keeping him nearby and in place as she answers the call from Tyrion and says, “Hey, what’s up?” And then after she attentively listens to Tyrion on the other line, she says, “Oh, no! Oh my God, I forgot. Oh my God, I’m _so sorry!”_

 

 

Predictably, she is very anxious when she makes it into work. She runs into his office right away, shutting the door tightly behind her really dramatically. She’s not even that late — about ten minutes — but she looks grief-stricken. He generally watches her in amusement as she talks a mile a minute. She is telling him that she really, really hopes the driver isn’t upset or frustrated with her. Tyrion tells her that the driver gets paid no matter what, so he doesn’t give a shit if the driver is “upset.” It’s more that when she didn’t appear at the front door of her building, they were all worried that she was like — dead or in peril or something.

He looks her outfit up and down — the plain white t-shirt one or two sizes too big for her — it is obviously a men’s shirt — and he also looks over her naked face, devoid of makeup today. It is all very telling.

Nevertheless, he teasingly asks, “Where were you? Where did you sleep last night?”

She squirms uncomfortably in her seat, cutting eye contact. She still says, “I was with a boy.”

He’s not even watching his words as he holds up his hand for a high-five and excitedly says, _“Yeah_ you were, _slut!”_

She’s transmitting a lot of embarrassment as she covers her face, before she reaches out and gives him a really weak five.

“So the thyroid med is definitely working.”

She’s still covering her face in shame as she says, “Yeah, my loins. They are on fire.”

 

 

 


	48. Missy gets a toy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey meets the rest of the family without the love of his life, and it stresses him out OMGGG. Missandei gets a really considerate present from Yara, who is mightily proud of herself. Then, Missy goes grab coffee with a woman who is better than her in every which way!

 

 

  
Grey shows up to Moss’ house and sees the house inhabited by rows and rows of cars. When he enters the house, he nearly gets bowled over by five kids chasing after each other, playing some variation of tag.

Grey is _pissed_ when he peeps the crowd at the party. He sees a bunch of old people, children, and also Missandei’s mother and father. He quickly changes his expectations and his expression before rushing over to greet them hello. He was led to believe that this was going to be a party with a narrow age range, of people in their late twenties to late thirties. He didn’t know that he’d also be hanging out with zygotes and octogenarians — _without_ Missandei because she is working three hours away over the weekend.

He generally cowers deeply as he says hello to Missandei’s mother and father. He generally avoids calling them by their first name because it’s too familiar. He avoids calling them Mrs. and Mr. because it’s so white. He just defaults to what he has been taught, which is sir and ma’am. It doesn’t even matter because Missandei’s mom is not impressed by him at all.

When Moss spots him, he says, “Baby boy! You made it!”

Grey learns that this party is full of their entire extended family. He starts texting Missandei hysterically behind his back, telling her that he’s meeting her aunts, her uncles, her cousins — fucking _without_ her. He is being introduced as her beau — he _thinks_ — because the only people who are speaking the Common Tongue here are the children, and his Low Valyrian is kind of  _not_ the greatest and her mom _definitely_ knows that but she still insists on speaking to him in it, and she insists on using terms and phrases that he does not understand. 

Missandei’s in the middle of manning a booth at a conference, so she cannot respond to him with much substance. She just quickly responds with: _LOLOL!!_

When he tries to confront Moss for blindsiding him like such an asshole, Moss just laughs. Because Moss didn’t anticipate that this would be much of an issue. It’s just people. They are all just people here. Moss observes that Grey has a tendency to get all amped like his little sis does. Moss lays his hand on Grey’s chest and says, “Relax.”

Grey knocks Moss’ hand off of his body and snappishly says, “Don’t tell me to _fucking relax!”_

Their dad is walking into the kitchen with Mars _right_ as Moss ignores Grey’s pissy mood and asks, “Yo, question. Have you gotten nasty with my baby sis yet?”

Mars’ laugh is an explosive guffaw. He points at Grey. He says, “Inquiring minds want to know.”

Grey shame is so intense that he pretty much avoids any and all eye contact with anybody — especially Missandei’s fucking _father._ He actually considers sprinting to the door and just getting into his car and leaving. He is also thinking that when he sees her again, he’s going to slap her right in her fucking face, because she needs to stop talking about their nonexistent sex life with her brothers.

So Grey takes the really, really mature course and he just pretends he didn’t hear this. He pretends that the question just wasn’t asked at all.

So Moss repeats. He shoves Grey backwards a step and says, “Hello! Did you hear me! I know you heard me. Are you and Missy smashing yet?”

Grey says, “Oh my God.” And he’s actually talking mostly to Missandei’s dad, even has he directs his gaze at absolutely no one. He says, “I am so sorry,” even though he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be sorry for.

Missandei’s dad ends up being cool about all of it — probably because he’s been around his own sons enough. He knows what they are like. Missandei’s dad also ends up pointedly ignoring all the attempts that Moss makes to embarrass the shit out of Grey. Their dad just stands awkwardly with a rootbeer in his hand and asks Grey really tepid questions about himself — like if he likes potato salad. Their dad tells him that there is just always a shit load of potato salad at these things because it’s food they know Missandei can eat. They have forgotten that she is busy and could not come today, though.

Grey quickly says, “Potato salad is fine. It’s good.”

Missandei’s dad kind of likes how Grey is always so freaked out and intimidated whenever they are around each other — not because he gets off on the anxiety. It’s more that it conveys to him that Grey is respectful and he’s traditional enough. Missandei’s dad kind of hates how kids their age tend to talk to elders like they are buddies. He kind of hates how kids their age are too familiar and casual. He likes that Grey calls him sir.

He asks, “Do your folks live around here?”

Grey says, “Yes sir. They live in the valley.”

“Ah, is that where you grew up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do your parents do?”

“My dad is retired. But he was a doctor. And my mom is a lawyer.”

“Ah, you come from a good family.”

Grey ducks his head. He cannot tell what this even means, if this is said in appreciation or in derision. He cannot tell if Missandei’s police officer dad is impressed or unimpressed by his overeducated parents and their advanced degrees. He is tempted to blurt out that his brother is a diving instructor and he himself only has one degree and his own parents aren’t that impressed by him and his laziness — to balance it all out. But he stops himself from completely flipping out in front of Missandei’s dad.

Missy’s dad is actually impressed. He is the kind of man who is really proud of what he has accomplished in life despite all of the obstacles. And he is also the kind of man that puts a lot of stock in prestige, appearance, and hierarchy. He likes the way Grey dresses for the most part. He likes Grey’s deferential body language. He likes that Grey is really polite. He likes that Grey apparently comes from good stock. He also likes that Grey has money and comes from money. He has concluded that Grey is more than capable of taking care of his daughter.

 

 

  
She shows up to the party after the conference ends for the day. She hadn’t really been planning on it because she knew she’d be tired, but all of Grey’s urgent-sounding text cracked her up, and she just wants to see what is happening for herself.

His back is legit damp when she touches him — because he’s been sweating — and he legit jumps in fright when he feels her hand on his body.

She laughs. Her brothers, uncles, and dad kind of laugh, too. Her mom is just hanging out with them, with this grim look on her face. So that’s great. She’s clearly in a good mood.

Grey doesn’t even relax when he spots Missandei. He just flashes her this tortured look and shuts his eyes for a moment.

She lightly asks, “So — what are you guys talking about?”

“Politics!” Moss answers easily, grinning. “Did you know that your man is like, a fucking hippie?”

“Yes,” she says simply. “I did.” She’s running her hand up and down his back soothingly now, because now she knows why he’s so stressed out. He’s trying to edge away from her touching, because he feels so self-conscious that she’s trying to get sexy with him in front of her family. He is losing it right now, so he is conflating a lot of things in his mind. She pulls her hand away from his back to reach out and take a paper plate of goodies that Safi silently hands to her. She smiles at Safi and mouths thank you.

Safi grins and says, “They’ve been torturing him all day.”

“He believes in zero youth detention,” Mars says. “And we’re like — well then where do we keep the serial rapists who are under 18? Do we send them to an art class so that they can paint out how they want to violently assault children? Is that what you want us to do, Grey?”

“No, of course not,” Grey says weakly. He is currently so broken and so weak from being so outnumbered and having all of his words so twisted up and manipulated.

“His mom does work with Youth Passageways,” Missandei says, spearing a potato wedge with her fork. “Part of that org’s work is to divert young people of color from going to prison and also to get their convictions reduced from felonies to misdemeanors. And his job is to work with law enforcement and government entities like you guys so that there is less human trafficking and general human rights violations and violent crime. Like, you guys already know this?” After swallowing her potato, she gestures to all of them with her fork. She says, “You guys are all just being assholes to him.” She means that she knows her brothers and she knows her family. Beyond her mom, the rest of them are just giving Grey shit because they think it’s funny to. Her mom legitimately is probably bothered that Grey is pro-serial rapist. Because her mom is often reasonable like that.

“Oh my God,” Mars says. “Look at Missy defending her man.”

“Oh my God,” Moss says. “She loves this motherfucker _so much.”_

She shrugs. Because it’s true. She _does_ love him so much.

 

 

Back at his place, he tells her that he isn’t in the mood for sex — before she even thinks about bringing it up. He just nips it all in the bud and tells her that he feels raw and pathetic and vulnerable and not very sexy, so he just wants to crawl into bed and just die there. He falls down face first and he tells her that it’s so great that his parents were like, so ga-ga for her from the get and her parents think he’s an idealistic, unrealistic moron who is overpaid for being good at computers while people like them toiled in real jobs that saved lives.

“My mom didn’t work,” she says, correcting him, crawling into bed next to him. She's bypassing his insane self-deprecation — because it is insane. She seats herself on his butt and she pushes up his shirt, pushing it up to his neck. When he realizes what she’s trying to do, he helps her out by just pulling his shirt all the way off. Her hands fall onto his warm skin after that. She starts kneading the muscles in his back as she dryly says, “My dad didn’t let my mom work because when women work, they have their own money and they can like — leave you and your abusive bullshit.” She runs her hands up his ribcage. She says, “Flex.”

He flexes, and she watches his muscles ripple. She suppresses a groan and pretty much stops herself from bending down and taking a bite out of his shoulder. He might not be in the mood to mess around, but she kind of is.

She’s working at some knots and kinks in him as she observes that his mom has always worked. He tells her that yes, his mom has always worked, probably out of necessity. Because they needed the money.

She tells him that his mom went back to school, to earn a law degree, later in life. He tells her that yes, she did, because she really wanted it.

She asks. “Do you remember what your dad’s response was? To that?”

Grey generally gets what she is trying to convey or trying to say or trying to figure out. He exhales into his pillow as her hands continue just touching his back liberally. He also considers rolling onto his back and seating her on his body in a different way, telling her that he has changed his mind about not being in the mood for sex.

He stays in place though. He just mutters, “My dad was really into it. He was really supportive and started looking into loans.” He pauses, and then he haltingly says, “You know how my dad feels . . . about my mom.”

In response to this, she bends down and plants a kiss on his shoulder blade. She tells him, “I honestly don’t even give one shit that my parents don’t love you. Because I love you.”

 

 

  
Presents are exchanged during the holiday at Dany’s lady brunch. Drogo was shooed out of the house after he finished setting up gluten-free, dairy-free charcuterie boards. Light spritzers in champagne glasses and festive hard alcohol in martini glasses with lemon twists get passed around. Alayaya and Kojja, whose contact info Dany snatched from Drogo’s phone, are pretty chill about not knowing very many people.

Everyone watches as Yara hands Missandei a crinkly package with a real bow on it. Yara likes to wrap presents like she wants to choke the box the death, so that they are impossible to open with just hands and fingers. Yara also comes prepared — she takes out a sharp folding knife, flicks it open with her thumb, makes everyone except Obara go whoa, and then she hands the knife over to Missandei, who awkwardly takes it with two fingers like it’s a soiled diaper or a live bomb. Missy slices through the ribbon — she doesn’t know how to close the knife so she has to hand it back to Yara for safety reasons — and then she awkwardly tears through paper.

Missy already has the sense that this is a fucking joke gift. This is a going to be a gift designed to humiliate her publicly, based on how excited, eager, and happy Yara looks.

Nailed it. It is totally a vibrator. She purses her lips tightly together when she sees the writing on the box. She picks up her present from the mess of the wrapping and holds it up, showing everyone as Yara loudly cackles and claps her hands.

Missandei says, “Thanks for this.”

“It’s to get your gorgeous-ass hot body off,” Yara supplies, helpfully.

“No, I _get it,”_ Missy says stiffly, just unable to play it very cool.

“I like, ready so many reviews and did so much comparison shopping —”

“Yara, _thank you,”_ Missy says aggressively. “This is very _thoughtful.”_

“You’re welcome, babe!” Yara says, crawling over the graveyard of wrapping paper to hug Missandei. “I wish you many orgasms in the coming year!”

Missy becomes the butt of a lot of light teasing after that. The ladies basically ask her what she thinks Grey is going to say about the vibrator. Dany jokingly calls the vibrator boyfriend number two. Yara tries to demonstrate technique to Missy via aggressive miming, making a bunch of them release out peals of giggles. Missandei gets a lot of nudges and a lot of winks. The teasing is actually very sweet and considerate and kind of empowering, especially after Jhiqui drunkenly stands up and makes an impassioned speech about prioritizing women’s pleasure — but these things still embarrass Missandei.

It is also pretty torturous to be teased in front of Grey’s really beautiful ex, as said ex silently watches with an amused smile on her face.

Missandei is so nervous and so anxious about this that she awkwardly says, “Ha-ha, this gift is hilarious.”

She immediately regrets the words as they come out of her mouth. She sounds unappreciative and ungrateful. She fucking _loves_ that she’s always an accidental asshole because she’s sometimes so bad with people.

It’s pretty hard to hurt Yara’s feelings though, but she still corners Missandei later in private — to clear some things up. Missy is scarfing down some hummus dip as Yara tells her that the vibrator is not a joke gift. Yara tells her that it’s a for real gift because Yara figured that Missandei is too shy and too embarrassed to buy a vibrator for herself, so Yara took it upon herself to get Missy the bestest gift ever. Yara reminds Missy that it is crazy that Missy hasn’t had sex in fifteen years — like, that fact has haunted Yara ever since she learned it. Yara was like, really troubled by the idea that Missandei hasn’t had an orgasm with someone else in fifteen years —

“Never, actually,” Missandei corrects.

It takes Yara a beat to register the words, and when she does, her eyes go wide. And then she whispers, _“Never?”_

“I had sex a few times with another virgin when I was sixteen, Yara,” Missandei says, also patiently and tensely reminding _herself_ of this fact.

“Oh my God,” Yara says, shaking her head. “What the fuck is Grey’s problem? He needs to stop being a fucking prude and get _on this.”_ And then with whiplash-fast conversational reflexes, Yara spontaneously reaches out to warmly rub Missy’s arm. Yara says, “I love you, girl.”

Missy says, “I love you, too. Thank you for the vibrator. I know you were being thoughtful. But hey, did you have to give it to me in front of everyone though? I really like how I gave you a matching set of monogrammed linen napkins — and you got me a sex toy.”

Yara cracks up, as she shakes Missandei by the arms, as if she’s surprised by the delight she feels.

 

 

  
Her first meaningful interaction with Alayaya happens at the end of brunch, as they are both shrugging into their coats. The vibrator that Yara gave Missandei is dangling in a clear plastic bag, hooked over her forearm. Alayaya is looking at it, which make Missy release an embarrassed sigh. It also inspires her to say, “This is a little weird, huh?”

“A little bit,” Alayaya says. “But also not really.”

“Okay, speak for yourself. I feel really uncomfortable.”

Alayaya is smiling. She asks, “Why are you uncomfortable?”

“Because you are so beautiful and poised and cool.” Missy pretty much has decided to just roll over and show her soft underbelly to Alayaya because this other woman is a million times better on paper, but Grey has inexplicably chosen Missandei to love. Like, they all know this. Let’s just get it out in the open so they can move on with their lives. Missy is currently kind of good at being direct with people.

“I think _you’re_ so beautiful and cool and poised,” Alayaya says to her, still smiling, kind of enigmatically.

“What?” Missy says. “No way!”

 

 

  
So they spontaneously end up going out for coffee right after brunch. They both state that they have some time to kill, but really, Alayaya is skipping a workout and Missy has texted Grey and told him that she’s running a _lot late_ in meeting him.

Missy basically hopes against all hope that she doesn’t end up blurting out a bunch of her sex insecurities and worries to Grey’s really hot, really sexually capable ex over coffee. Missy just hopes that she can keep the conversation on stuff like their life aspirations and how hard it is to be a working woman in a man’s world.

Missy shoved the vibrator into her purse so it’s not a distraction. She holds her coffee in both of her hands, warming them up as the coffee cools enough to drink. She says, “I like your nails. I can’t do long nails because I type a lot for work, and I don’t like typing with long nails.”

Alayaya reflexively examines her purple long nails. She says, “Thank you.”

They then engage in the sort of polite conversation that people who don’t know each other well have. They talk about holiday plans. Alayaya will visit her parents separately because their divorce was acrimonious, and she is their only child. Missandei spends a lot of time asking curious questions about that situation, constantly self-conscious about being too intrusive. Alayaya keeps smoothly reassuring her, telling her that the questions aren’t too personal.

Alayaya asks Missy about what her plans for the holiday — and here, Missy kind of freezes, because she’s not sure. She tells Yaya that she typically goes to her parents’ house for the entire day — they have a lot of people, her brothers’ families and some nearby extended family. She admits to Yaya that she hasn’t asked Grey what his plans are — if he intends for her to join him in whatever he does with his family or if they are just going to do the holiday separately — or maybe do double-duty?

“His family doesn’t celebrate the holiday,” Alayaya says softly.

“Oh,” Missandei says, feeling her face get hot because this woman knows apparently already knows _everything_ about Missandei’s boyfriend.

“Yeah, when he was young, his parents were always working during the holiday, so he and his brother just hung around the house by themselves. And you know how his dad is — his dad doesn’t like doing stuff that doesn’t make sense. And this holiday is commercialized and designed to make people buy things, so his dad banned it in their household.”

“Oh,” Missandei blurts out nervously. “That’s kind of sad.”

“I think Grey’s pretty okay with it?” Alayaya says. And then she realizes that things are getting a bit awkward because she is just talking _so much_ about her ex to his new lady, so she quickly says, “Or not? Who knows. Maybe he feels differently about it now?”

 

 

 


	49. Missy is an accidental jerk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy tries to make a romantic dinner for the love of her life, but she is just terrible to him in the process of it. So he leaves. And then she cries. That's basically what happens in this chapter! :(

 

 

  
She is running extra-extra late. Grey has already arrived and is waiting for her in the lobby, talking with Lawrence, by the time that she shows up with an armful of groceries in paper bags. He doesn’t immediately rush over when he sees her. He lets Lawrence finish out his story about his eldest son’s desire to dick around and not be concerned with his studies at all. Grey has no kids, so all he has been doing is empathetically listening and stopping himself from telling Lawrence that his own brother was also not concerned with his studies at all — and his brother now jumps from job to job and their parents are all concerned that they are going to have to financially care for this person for the rest of their lives because they had gone wrong with him at some point. Grey has refrained from scaring the shit out of Lawrence by telling him that sometimes what parents fear about their children actually just comes true.

Lawrence abruptly stops the conversation when he spots Missandei. He says, “Hello, Miss,” managing to sound both overly familiar and overly formal at once. “You’ve done some shopping.” He reaches out to lighten her load by taking half of her bags into his arms. Grey ends up following suit — he actually pulls bags from Lawrence and takes bags from her. He does this more for Lawrence’s sake than Missandei. Lawrence can’t really leave his post.

To Grey, Lawrence says, “It was nice talking to you, man,” definitely sounding familiar. “I really appreciate it.”

“Same,” Grey says, smiling.

 

 

  
They still alternate between awkwardness and being comfortable with each other. Right now, it is a touch awkward because she’s so flustered and annoyed with herself for being so behind schedule and for making him wait for her basically all day. She cannot articulate this to him properly as they ride up together in the elevator because her mind is so tied up in how annoying she is. The silence between them is just protracted and the energy between them is a little pensive.

As he walks into her apartment, he considers just grabbing her for a quick hug and a kiss — but her anxiety has bled a little bit into him. He’s reticent because he doesn’t know what exactly is bothering her. He is nervous that she is going through something real, and he doesn’t want to be the kind of guy who acts like a kiss cures all.

In moments of extreme frustration in the past, Alayaya used to tell him that he wasn’t romantic enough — that he didn’t even seem to give a shit about her or care enough because he didn’t act like he needed her like he needed air. When he tried to rectify and go to her, she physically pushed him away because she felt that gestures were meaningless when he had to be told to make them. She used to get frustrated with him for not just knowing.

It generally stung whenever she physically pushed him away. He tends to risk a little bit less these days, because of that experience. It generally feels a lot safer to just use his words.

“Is everything alright?”

“Ugh! I’m so _behind!”_ Missandei gripes, tipping over a bag and just chaotically letting all of her produce spill onto her counter. “The first store didn’t have arugula — can you believe that? I had to go to _another_ store to buy it. It wasted so much _time!”_

Mildly, he says, “You didn’t have to buy arugula. You could’ve gotten some other salad greens? Or a mix?” He’s trying to be kinda supportive, kinda helpful, and he’s trying to kind of remind her that it’s not a big deal, and it’s just dinner.

“I have to follow a recipe,” she says flatly, swinging her eyes up to — for real — glare at him real quick. “I’m not like you where I can make shit up and it tastes great.”

So he just stops talking to her after that. She is cranky and being a bit of a jerk, and he’s no longer about being a frustrated woman’s punching bag, so he just starts silently cleaning up after her as she puts her entire concentration on cooking. He pulls out all the food from paper bags, then he folds the bags and stacks them on the corner of the counter because he doesn’t know if she prefers to recycle them or if she wants to reuse them for something. He waits and tries not to watch her too intently, as she handles a knife with really bad knife skills. He tries not to look judgmental about it — but he is scared she is going to cut herself if he doesn’t tell her to curl her fingers back.

Still, he says, “Babe. You might want to maybe choke up on the handle a little bit more and also get your fingers out of the way of the blade —”

“Please don’t mansplain right now,” she says dully, still doing exactly what he suggested anyway.

Awesome. He wants to go home now.

He ends up grabbing her coat and scarf and going to her closet to hang them up. He doesn’t even know if she keeps this particular coat and this particular scarf in there. He just needs something to do besides sitting and waiting in silence. He does not really want to be the kind of guy who sits on the couch and watches TV as his woman cooks behind him. He would ask her what she’d like for him to do, but now he’s afraid she’s going to bite his head off for asking. He generally wonders if he has a type. Maybe his type is actually scorching hot women of color who like making him feel _like an idiot_ because they cannot properly process their own emotions.

He picks up her purse from where she threw it on the counter and he moves it to a side table so she has more space to prepare dinner. He pretty much does a doubletake when he sees a vibrator, in its original box, in there. He generally averts his eyes and closes the purse tighter because he’s probably infringing on her privacy. He puts the purse on her console table without comment.

And then he generally thinks some more about how fucking _terrible_ sex is going to be for the two of them. It’s going to be terrible because she would probably have more fun with a vibrator than with him. He is still wracked with nerves about it. He is still scared that what will happen with them is something that has happened to him a number of times in the past. Sex changes everything. Sex can even change love. He’s been with women who thought they were okay with his body until they figured that they were actually not. So he generally got ghosted because most people are fucking cowards and cannot even tell him that they cannot make themselves feel a certain way about him — to his face. They just fade from his life and he gets left with the fallout and lack of closure.

It even happened with Alayaya the first time they did it. They were good friends. He confided in her too much. He told her no one was ever going to like, love him because he was a fucking freak of nature. She disputed this. When he didn’t buy her words, she proved it to him by having sex with him. _Then,_ she went through a period in which she distanced herself from him because she was “freaked out.” She ended up flirting with Rickie, who was one year ahead of them, as she figured some things out. Grey kind of went insane and he yelled at her for being a slutty bitch in the cafeteria — he is still really proud of that moment and the kind of mental state he was in. She ended up really being moved by his very public and problematic meltdown. So they were officially together after that.

For the most part, he feels that he has worked so fucking hard with Syrio, to get the fuck over all of that shit. He has worked so fucking hard to learn how to not let his brain go into full-blown panic mode. He does not yell at anyone with such heat anymore. He is forcefully communicative now. He creates these limits all over, so that he never feels so vulnerable and raw that he flips the fuck out because of it.

He looks at Missandei, who is currently cooking with a lot of aggression. She is banging lids onto pots, and there is a perma-scowl on her face as she picks up her phone, over and over again, to read her recipes. He doesn’t even know why he’s not allowed to help. He doesn’t know why she is already so angry being around him. He feels really stupid as he says, “Um, when do you think dinner will be ready?” He’s asking because he’s thinking about maybe going for a walk and taking a breather.

She says, “It’ll be ready when it’s ready.”

It makes him feel utterly terrible. It actually really stings. He’s not really about words of affirmation, but he also doesn’t like it when people talk to him with such disdain. He’s already been there and done that.

Right now, he’s working really hard to not open his mouth and letting something really petty and angry come out because he feels so small that he just needs to hurt her before she hurts him. He’s trying not to tell her she’s a shitty cook so dinner is going to be shitty anyway — just give him a fucking ETA, Jesus Christ.

His chest just throbs. He starts feeling really emotional about this — about having to hold it in because he wants to stay fair to her. He also doesn’t think he should have to take this shit from her. But he doesn’t want to be unfair to her, so he has to be unfair to himself. He wonders why it always has to be like this, why this is always his dilemma.

He just walks into the bathroom, under the guise of needing to pee or something. He slides the door shut. He sits on the toilet. And he pretty much tries and stops himself from tearing up really angrily. He cannot process his feelings right now because it’s inconvenient to, so his body is just _embarrassing_ him because it is _so good_ at that.

He wants to talk to his mom so that she can just give him acceptance. He might want to talk to his dad, too, so his dad can tell him that he’s better than all of this, that he deserves more than scraps and halfways. He left his fucking phone out in the living room, so he actually can’t talk to his parents. It is for the best, because he’s a grownass man, and he needs to fucking stop clinging to his mommy and daddy whenever he is upset about something. He realizes he is being crazy right now. No one would describe him as clingy.

Ten minutes probably pass as he tries to get it the fuck together on the toilet — and she hasn’t noticed because she hasn’t said his name or called out for him. She probably thinks he’s taking a monster shit right now or something. He looks outside of her frosted window and imagines just making a break for it. Maybe this time, he will be the one to ghost a woman. Maybe this time, he will be the one who fades from her life without a word. He is dozens of fucking floors up though. He will die if he tries to climb out.

He’s not always great at pulling himself out of his head. Sometimes the silence and the stillness only affords him more space to just get _real deep_ into it. He keeps thinking that maybe he should just resign himself to dying alone, as his heart just keeps throbbing painfully in his chest. Now he doesn’t know if he’s actually ever going to get out of this fucking room and actually look and appear normal. This is going to be fucking amazing. This is going to be great. It just keeps getting better and better.

He starts pulling in deeper breaths. He can hear the sizzling of something in oil and he can hear the clacking of her wooden spoon. It’s so distracting, so he turns on the bathroom fan to drown out the noise. He starts counting. He starts trying to blank out. He tries to like, have a quick, centering meditation session right there on her toilet so that he can get out of this room and feel okay about it.

 

 

 

Missandei seriously does not notice that Grey has been in the bathroom for a really long time. She has lost track of the passage of minutes, because she is so wrapped up in making dinner. She has burned herself a little on a pot — and she keeps getting major steam facials even time she opens a lid. There’s just so much going on, and she is just _so bad_ at this. She had all of these grandiose plans. She was going to cook him dinner all by herself, because he is always cooking for her, and he is just so wonderful with her dietary restrictions. She just wants this to be perfect, and she fucked herself from the moment she decided to stop off for coffee with Alayaya. She was an insecure brat, and she fucked herself that way, for being a self-indulgent immature brat. She is annoyed that all of this stuff isn’t _ready_ already. She’s getting so pissed that it’s so hard and it’s looking like it’s not going to turn out great because she feels so stressed out and rushed.

He’s in the edge of her line of sight when he walks out of the bathroom without a word. He picks up his jacket on the back of the couch and holds it in his hand as he says, “Hey, I’m going to go for a walk.”

She says, “What? Right now? But I’m making you dinner?”

“How much longer is it going to be? I can be back before it’s ready.”

She says, “I don’t _know_ how much longer. I haven’t made _any_ of this stuff before. Can’t you just — wait patiently?”

Her eyes have been trained on her pots and pans — to make sure nothing fucking burns or boils over — so she doesn’t see his eyes go completely cold.

He says, “I have been waiting patiently. All day, I’ve been waiting for you. You said be here at four — and I was already on my way here when you said be here at six. So I killed some time — which is _not_ a big deal. But then you showed up at six thirty without letting me know you were running later — and that’s cool. But like — it’s almost eight. Um, I just wanted to go get some air. I can be back by —”

“Are you seriously giving me a shit for being half an hour late?” she says, looking up at him now. “I’m sorry for not letting you know — there was traffic. But I’m usually never late. I’m usually early. You’re usually the one who is a little bit late.”

“I’m not at all saying that it bothered me,” he says.

“Actually, that’s exactly what you just said. You just broke down your entire day — of waiting around for me,” she says. Then she sarcastically says, “I’m sorry I made you waste your time.”

He says, “That’s not what I meant —”

She responds with, “That’s what it sounded like.” And then she just angrily drops her spoon onto the counter. She says, “Why am I even _trying_ right now!”

He looks like he doesn’t even know how to respond to this. He’s just staring at her — without wavering.

Then he says, “I’m going to go home. I’m sorry about bailing on dinner — I’m like, really sorry about that. But I really need to go home. It’s not good for me to be here right now.”

 

 

  
She bursts into tears after he leaves — after he ditches her — because she doesn’t even know _what happened._ She starts crying kind of hysterically as she shuts off all of the burners on the stove and just leaves the almost-finished food there. She doesn’t yet have the capacity to replay the night and see where she went wrong. She doesn’t realize she’s been talking to him like he was annoying her all night — when she was actually annoyed at herself, but it came out wrong because she is sometimes bad with people.

She’s sobbing into her phone as she dials Dany’s phone number.

 

 

  
She tells Dany her version of events in hiccups, pained wails, and occasionally, whispers. She tells Dany that after she left Dany’s house, she had coffee with Alayaya, and Alayaya is just really nice and really cool — and just generally made Missandei feel inadequate because Alayaya’s so nice and Grey would probably still be in love with her and in a relationship with her if she hadn’t cheated on him.

Missy tells Dany that she wanted to make a really nice dinner for him, but she’s just _such_ a shitty cook — and he’s so good at it because he’s so good at everything. She didn’t want to feed him shitty food, but it was so stressful because she was pretty sure she was about to feed him shitty food. He got kind of impatient with her ineptitude and kept asking her how long it was going to take — like he didn’t realize what a big deal this was to her and how much she loves him. So they had a stupid fight. And then he _just left._ He left her with a chaotic shit ton of uneaten food.

She’s crying into the reciever as she says, “I look like such a stupid, pathetic asshole right now!”

 

 

  
When Missy hears the knock on her door and opens it — she sees Dany and she also sees Drogo. Awesome. She actually says, “Oh great, Drogo is here,” right to his face.

Her eyes are red and swollen — and his wife told him that Missandei is just completely losing her shit right now — so he does not take offense. He just says, “What’s up? I’m told I’m here to eat the shitty food you made for Grey so that you don’t feel so alone?”

It’s bold. And it works. It ends up making her laugh, as she reaches up to wipe at her eyes for the millionth time in the last hour. She says, “Thanks.”

They both tell her the food is actually not that bad. The meat is a little overcooked — or undercooked. Like, it either has to be seared and cut up thinly or it has to be braised for a lot longer in order to be tender enough. She went in the middle. Missandei — who is drinking straight from a bottle of organic wine and getting sad-drunk now — laughs hysterically as a few more tears fall down her cheeks.

Drogo is a fucking boy for life — because when he feels that she’s ready enough to hear him out, he just starts _defending the shit_ out of Grey. He tells her that her story doesn't really make sense to him. He tells her that Grey just getting up and leaving while someone is doing something considerate for him is wildly out of character. It is so out of character. Grey is the kind of idiot that will poison himself with shit food, if he thinks that someone even mildly put themselves out. Drogo tells them that Grey is the kind of fucker that sits for hours with Drogo’s mom, as Drogo’s mom buffs his nails and tells him stories, because she once picked him up from school because his parents were busy working and it was rainy. She saw him walking home in the rain and was like, hell no. Like, Drogo wanted to go out to a party. And his entire night was ruined because Grey was getting his nails done. Drogo says, “I don’t believe that he walked out because he got annoyed with you. You’ve got this all wrong, Missy.”

“Tell us how you really feel,” Dany says dryly.

“I see why you brought him,” Missy says to Dany, just tired and drunk and still pretty sad. “You are so manipulative,” she says, as she takes another pull from her bottle. “And I love it.”

“Call him,” Dany suggests.

 

 

 

 


	50. Missy thinks Grey is hot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy and Grey make up this chapter. And then they start doing some pretty non-PG touching in the midst of their heightened emotions. Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

 

Missy is too embarrassed to call Grey in front of them. She doesn’t know why she’s so embarrassed because she already looks completely crazy. That ship has sailed, so there’s not much dignity left to preserve. She has already cried her face off when Drogo threw her a bone and told her that he likes “the taste of onions” in the gravy she made. She has already watched Dany pull out burnt gluten-free, prepackaged dinner rolls out of the warm oven, scraping the char off with a steak knife.

Missy still locks herself in her bathroom for some privacy. She still turns on the fan so that Drogo and Dany can’t eavesdrop — as if they even care. They are currently cleaning up the mess in her kitchen right now because they are good friends, and Missy has light PTSD from the events of the night. She can’t look at the things that are destroying her relationship.

She takes a few steadying breaths as she sits on the toilet. She thinks she’s got it together enough, as her heart throbs in her throat and her eyes. She thinks that she can get through this calmly and rationally as she dials his number.

He picks up quickly. She hears him say her name.

The sound of her name in his voice immediately rattles her calmness. It immediately puts her in a vulnerable state of mind.

So she just starts sobbing all over again — this time to him — drunkenly — into the phone.

 

 

  
He briefly considers standing his ground and making it clear that he’s not at her beck and call — he’s not just going to come running whenever she is distraught. Except he is already putting his coat back on, transferring his phone to his other ear to shrug into his other sleeve. He’s struggling to completely understand what she is trying to say to him.

His decision to go back to her is kind of easy because she is not condemning him or accusing him of anything. She is slurring her words, and she’s crying as she admits to him that she is a little bit drunk. She is telling him that she only drank half of a bottle of wine, but it is just making her so emotional. She corrects herself and she says she means it is making her extra emotional. It was also hard to make dinner because she’s so bad at cooking because she’s not naturally talented at anything. And then she corrects herself and tells him that she knows she is being real self-indulgent right now. She’s really great at languages — she knows this. She just means that dinner tastes like fucking garbage, so she understands why he left. She tells him that it was hard for her to watch him walk away from her. A part of her thinks it’s forever even though it is clearly not, but maybe a part of her fears that it’s the _start_ of _the end._

She says, “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t want to put you in a position where you have to reassure me. I’m sorry. Ignore me. I mean — don’t ignore me-ignore me. I mean, just ignore the parts where my anxiety is just screaming out. The rest of me, don’t ignore. Like, I want you to hear me, you know? Have I been doing a bad job of hearing you?”

He says, “No.” And then he says, “I don’t know.” And then more firmly, he says, “No. Just tonight.” He’s sighing, because he is talking like her, as he waits for the elevator in his building to come up to retrieve him.

It takes awhile for him to get back there because they live a distance away from each other. On the drive back, he plans out what he’s going to say and how he’s going to smooth things over when he sees her again. He’s probably going to walk her through their entire night, from his point of view. He’s probably going to feel like a real idiot, for all of the moments he got ultra-sensitive because she was kind of short with him. If she doesn’t end up freaking out on him — which actually seems unlikely right now — she seems keen on making up — he’s probably going to try her food and spend the rest of the night holding onto her.

He tries to be extra normal, as he walks past Lawrence for the fucking billionth time of the night. Lawrence can tell that Grey and Missandei had some sort of tiff. Lawrence is like, “Hey, man! Good to see you again!” as Grey waves to him and generally feels like a real tool.

All of his planning flies out the window when he sees that Drogo and Dany are at her place.

He blinks a few times in surprise. He flushes hot, as he realizes that they are completely clued into the drama. He feels embarrassed that this happened — over food. He softly says, “Oh, hey, guys.” And he just avoids looking at Missandei, just in case eye contact makes her cry, just in case eye contact makes _him_ cry.

Drogo presses a hand into Grey’s shoulder. He says, “Hey, buddy.”

Dany asks, “Have you eaten yet?”

He has to reluctantly say, “Uh, actually yeah.” He pulled in at a drive-thru on the way home because he was starving. He ordered a fat burger and some fries and scarfed it down in his car even though he usually never eats in his car. He tells Dany, “But I can eat again.”

“You don’t have to,” Missandei says from her corner of the apartment, meekly. “It tastes like garbage.”

Grey frowns, as he continues to studiously avoid eye contact with her. Drogo is saying, “It honestly wasn’t that bad,” as Dany dishes Grey a plate of leftovers. It’s basic meat and vegetables stuff.

He stands around as he tastes it. He says, “It’s a little salty, but this is pretty okay, actually.”

“The extra salt is from Missy’s tears,” Drogo cracks, crossing his arms and grinning.

“Shut up,” she says softly — weakly — because he is being honest. She can’t fight how honest he is. And then to Grey, she says, “Is it really all right?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I actually like bitter tastes, so I get the arugula now. It’s nice.”

“I know you like bitter tastes,” she says softly.

Dany and Drogo excuse themselves soon after that. They don’t even bother making up excuses for their quick exit. Drogo just pulls his heavy jacket back on and tells them that he was in the middle of cleaning out their fridge and replacing the dead light bulb in their oven when Missy called Dany blubbering. They are probably going to head to the hardware store before it closes to buy the right bulb. Drogo says that he figured that they came, they ate, they cleaned, they were heroic. All in a good day’s work.

Dany kind of smiles in amusement and lightly swats him with the back of her hand as he holds out her coat for her. Dany says that she doesn’t even want to go to the hardware store because it’s just not something she is interested in. She tells them she hopes the side trip is quick, and Drogo doesn’t get sidetracked looking at all of the shit. She tells Missandei something really obvious — that all of the pots and pans didn’t fit in the dishwasher so it’ll need to be run twice. Drogo explains to them that Dany is being Captain Obvious because she has never done dishes in her entire life.

She says, “Shut up. I have. Many times.” After she zips up her jacket, she walks around giving out hugs. She hugs Grey as she kind of rolls her eyes at him. She hugs Missandei tightly because she is biased.

Drogo hugs Grey and casually talks about how the snow is coming down pretty hard in the mountains. They should definitely plan a trip up — and stat. Grey agrees with this — kind of anxiously. He’s trying to usher their friends out the door so he can like, finally talk to Missandei.

He basically pushes them out the door. He shuts it in front of Drogo and Dany and locks it.

When he turns back to Missandei, he says, “They’re good friends.”

She says, “Yeah.”

 

 

  
They talk through the misunderstanding and miscommunication pretty quickly. He bluntly tells her that she was being such a bitch to him that it made him so insecure. She tells him that she completely did not realize she was being a bitch to him — but in hindsight, yes, she totally was. She tells him she’s so sorry. She just wanted to make dinner perfect for him. He tells her that he gets that now. He gets why she was so anxious and stressed out. It’s very sweet. It’s also unnecessary. He’s happy with her best effort. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

They seriously have nothing else to say to each other after that. That is basically all of it. Like, it is resolved.

So she starts kissing him. She walks up to him and she winds her arms across the back of his neck. She starts off kissing him in gratitude — she’s so glad he came back and she’s so glad that they aren’t in a fight anymore — but he kisses her back with such rawness and emotion that her mood quickly takes a turn. The kissing is open and wet because her nose is a little stuffy — it takes on a quality — because she’s emotional and he’s emotional and she keeps breathing hot air on him.

She starts kissing him faster and harder, as his hands come up to grab her face and tangle into her hair. She shoves her tongue into his mouth and groans loudly as he tilts her head back to get better access. She constricts her arms tighter and tighter around him, until she is pressed into him, with her breasts, her pelvis, and her thighs — as he breaks the kissing to breathe raggedly against her wet mouth.

She starts pulling him backwards — she starts trying to blindly take him into the bedroom. He starts following her, taking small steps forward. She is stumbling backwards, as she watches the miracle of this happening. She is muttering, “Oh my God, yes,” against his lips, as she closes her eyes and starts making out with him again.

She pivots around him so that she can gently push him down on the bed. He stares up at her wordlessly — with his eyes dark and his hands running up her backside. She straddles him before she sits on him. She pushes him down to the mattress using her body weight. She bites down on her bottom lip as she sinks down over the zipper of his jeans. She shuts down the noise that wants to come out of her throat. She doesn’t move her hips at all. She doesn’t let herself stare at him for longer than a split second. She is being deathly quiet about this because she is trying so hard not to spook him.

She pulls off her shirt. She immediately bends down and kisses him after taking her shirt off, so that he doesn’t have to think much about it. She sucks and licks and tastes him, as his hands cautiously touch down on her waist. She feels the tips of his fingers on her bare skin. She can feel him debating internally — his kisses are soft and cautious right now. They are a little shy.

She has to do some crazy balancing and engage her core and her leg muscles as she maintains the kiss and reaches around her back with her hands to unclasp the hooks of her bra. She lets it loosen and fall open and her arms go back to bracing her body weight, pressed against the pillow next to his head. She exhales and sighs against him heavily — an unconscious thing — as his hand runs up her spine, pulling out these shivers.

As he kisses her, as he lies directly underneath her, he starts carefully touching all of the PG areas of her exposed body. He touches her neck, her shoulder, her arms, her face. He grabs ahold of her face in one hand and pushes it back a little bit, so that he can look at her eyes. He whispers to her that he loves her face, as a finger on his other hand draws lines on it. He confesses to her that he’s a fair bit freaked out still — about the entire night, about sex, about them and their relationship. He tells her, “I’m freaked out and scared because — I’m, like — I’m really invested in this relationship. I really need for us to work. Because I’m in love you now.”

She shuts her eyes tightly in response to that. She pushes back down, pressing against his hand as she dips back into his mouth. She does this so he can’t see much of her response to his words. A moan escapes out in between their mouths as her eyes burn up with these hot tears that secretly start carving silent trails down her face.

She starts getting dark and urgent with her touching and her actions. She keeps hiding her face from him as she recovers — she has somehow gotten it into her head that she needs to be calm and level-headed about this, if she wants them to be successful at this. She pulls his shirt up roughly and violently, covering his face with a cotton blend as she quickly reaches up to wipe her eyes. She tears his shirt off his body, and then she discards her dangling bra along with it, throwing them onto the floor.

She loves the way he looks at her sometimes. She loves the way his eyes drink up her body. She loves the way his face tenses up in disbelief — every single time he sees her with her shirt off. She imagines that the novelty of this will eventually die for him — that he will eventually look at her like she is mundane — so she is telling herself to savor this while she has it. She is making herself commit all of it to memory: The way his lips part. The way his breathing changes. The way his eyes go a little black as his pupils dilate. The way his hands clench and touch her skin, like he is trying to hold himself back.

She doesn’t know how to sexily take off her pants. She probably missed her moment back when they were still standing up.

She has to get off of him to extract herself from her pants, her movements awkward and sluggish. She is lying beside him, rolling from side to side as she shimmies her tight jeans off, while trying not to take her underwear down with it. She keeps thinking that they have to do this piecemeal, that she can’t skip to the end without first traversing through the middle.

Her awkward struggles in getting her pants off _does_ knock him out of enough of his arousal for his brain to take over a little bit again. He swallows before he says, “We’re getting a little carried away.”

She says, “No, we’re not,” as she triumphantly gets her foot free from the last pant leg. She throws her jeans on the ground and immediately gets back on top of him, planting herself over where his penis would be. She suppresses a groan — at the almost-rough feel of his jeans and his zipper underneath the flimsy material of her panties. She asks him, “Don’t I feel good? Don’t you _want me?”_

He mutters, “Shut up,” because she _must know_ how much he wants her. He starts touching her frontside. He can’t help it. He can’t stop looking at her. His hand shakes as he softly runs his forefinger in between her breasts, down her stomach. He’s testing the waters. He’s preparing himself for how this can feel.

He tries to cut through the sexual tension — he tries to ruin this by opening his mouth and telling her he’s still scared he’s going to be terrible at sex and she will leave the bed with so many fucking regrets. He says, “What if I don’t do it for you?”

She says, “You are already doing it for me.”

He shakes his head because he doesn’t know — he doesn’t understand this at all. He switches tactic and starts to tell her more terrible, emasculating stories about the women who have rejected him and his body in the past — but she cuts him off because she doesn’t want to hear it right now. She throws a blanket statement over it all. She tells him that everyone he has known and has ever been involved with — including her — is a fucking asshole. As she shifts her weight on top of him to get a little more comfortable — because a leg is falling asleep, she says, “I’m really sorry you’ve had to deal with so many fucking assholes in your life, baby. Let me _make it up to you.”_

He shoves out, “Oh my God,” as her body grinds down into his. She’s got her thighs on either side of his hips. There are several layers, of her panties, his boxers, his jeans, a strip of tiny metal teeth that are still separating their bodies. But he can still feel her on top of him. He can still feel the heat coming out from in between her legs just radiating down on him. He looks at where she is sitting on him. And then he looks up.

He has somehow forgotten that she isn’t wearing a shirt.

She starts lightly grinding. He has to grab her ass to try and get her to stop. She thinks it’s sexy — the way his fingers are digging so hard into her flesh, so she lets out this moan. Her mouth falls a little bit open. Her eyes close a little bit shut. She bends down to kiss him.

The wet sounds of their mouths meeting and retreating fills his head as he sloppily runs his hands over her bare back. Her mouth follows him wherever he goes. Her hands are stationary, braced against the mattress.

She breaks up the kiss to sit back up. Her lips are swollen as she reaches down and touches the light trail of hair that disappears beneath the waistband of his jeans. He sucks in a breath.

She notices him staring at her breasts. She smiles, before she coyly asks, “Did you like touching my boobs? In the Summer Isles? Because I liked you touching them. _A lot.”_

He trying so hard to ignore how apparently awesome she is at bedroom talk. He deflects and just says, “Oh God, I was so drunk.”

She says, “You’re much more relaxed around me when you’re drunk.”

He says, “Sorry,” because he thinks he needs to apologize for this.

“No,” she says quietly. “It’s okay. I don’t mind either way. But I — I like seeing you want me.”

“I always want you,” he says, equally as soft.

“Yeah?” She smiles. “Is this the part where I say, ‘Prove it’?”

“Babe —”

“Grey, I’m not asking you to have sex with me _right now,”_ she says. “I’m asking you to touch my boobs again.”

He says, “Oh.”

“Please.”

He says, “Fucking shit, _okay,”_ as he reaches up and starts palming her breasts. She gasps and just watches his hands as they lightly run over breasts, as adrenaline starts choking her. She moans before she tells him that the sight of his hands on her boobs is so crazy. She tells him that he’s so gentle and careful with them, and it drives her crazy. She tells him that she thought he’d be rough and hard on them, that he’d be doing more squeezing — this confession makes him groan and it makes his hand flex a little bit — as he just stops himself from doing what she just said — squeezing the shit out of her tits. He is still misguidedly trying to keep this classy and clean and chaste. His soft touch over her sensitive nipples feel like he’s tracking electricity right to her crotch. She stops herself from getting gross and telling him that her fucking vagina is like, a dirty, sloppy mess because of him. She is also trying to keep this as sweet and romantic and clean as it can be. She tells him it doesn’t feel like this when she touches her own boobs.

He quickly tells her, “You’re so fucking hot. You’re so fucking soft. You smell so fucking _good._ I feel like I am holding the breasts of a _fucking angel_ in my hands. I don’t even know _what to do_ about this!”

She also thinks that he’s also kind of awesome at bedroom-talk. He’s kind of doubly awesome at touching her boobs. Her mind goes all fuzzy as her body just gets more and more excited for more of this. She looks down — looks at his thumb brushing over a nipple — she whimpers — she is wondering when sex becomes sex. She is wondering if what he is doing to her body already qualifies as sex. She is afraid to ask him because she is afraid he’s going to take it away.

Then she looks at his face.

It looks utterly tortured and tense — in a really, really good way. He looks like he is really into _this._

She says, “Oh _God,”_ in response to his beautiful face, as she reaches down and grabs him. She digs her nails into his shoulder as she tries to tug him up.

It makes him wince, before he realizes that she wants him to sit up.

They both groan kind of miserably because he has to reposition her body so that he can properly sit up. They both lose the direct contact of their hips. They both start missing it. His hands are gripping her thighs tightly as he takes a moment to recover. He can smell her clearly like this — he can smell her arousal now.

She pulled him up because she wants to know what it feels like to have his mouth on her breasts. She feels too vulnerable lying down, so she chose to go this route with it. She presses her palms to the tops of his shoulders and uses him for balance as she slowly rises to her knees.

He looks up at her face as she does this. And then he looks straight ahead, at her boobs.

She hopes to _God_ that he intuits and he understands it without her having to verbalize this incredibly insecure logic out to him.

He does. He gets it.

From her vantage point — from her position looming over him with a hand braced tensely against the headboard behind him — she just mentally records the image of him tilting his head and making clear eye contact with her, as he slowly leans over to press a kiss into the side of her breast — as her mind is just _screaming_ in its own brand of disbelief. She thinks that his eyes are taunting her — at least a little bit. She thinks that this look means that he knows what she wants. And this time, he is going to give her what she wants.  
  
And it is so _hot._ It fucking rattles her core.

He starts sprinkling chaste pecks all over her skin, purposely avoiding her nipples. It is really nice, but the feel of it is not doing enough for her. The look of it is really sexy, though. And the wet, smacking sound of it is actually pretty fucking _pornographic._ She shuts her eyes for a moment and just listens to the sound of him kissing her body as she has to guess where his next kiss is going to land.

“Come on,” she finally whispers to him. “More.”

“More?” he asks, his voice low and moderated. “What do you mean _more?”_

She lets out this frustrated whine out of the back of her throat. Because he has already proven himself to be a sex mind-reader, and he is obviously just playing dumb on purpose right now. She says, “I love you.”

He looks up at her at that — smiling. He quietly says, “You love me?” and he knows that she’s trying to deflect — she’s trying to avoid explicitness.

She says _“Please,”_ and the sound of it — the syllable, the word, the emotion of it — it actually makes her tear up. She starts crying because she sounds so _open_ and so _vulnerable_ and just so _on display._ Her boobs are being presented to his face, and she’s just begging him to give them a proper kiss. It is just fucking _crazy._

The sight of her tears alarms him — just like how she somehow knew they would be when they started this to begin with. He immediately straightens and then forces her to sit back down in his lap. He cups her face in his hands and starts wiping her tears away. He does it so tenderly and so carefully and she loves him _so much_ that she just starts full-on sobbing over it. This completely scares him. The sudden shift in her mood just freaks him out. He immediately crushes her body into his, smashing her soft chest into his hard one. He is pressing kisses into the side of her face as he starts reassuring her and telling her that she is okay.

She is crying hard enough that she can’t tell him that _no shit_ she is okay. She is actually doing _really fucking great._ She was getting intimate with like — someone she loves this much. She didn’t even have a clue that it would feel like _this_ and that he would be great about _everything._

She’s crying like a lunatic as he hugs her tightly and holds her to his chest like she is a hysterical woman. He is saying, “Miss, are you okay?” as he cuddles her, as his hand soothingly rubs her back.

Great. They are doing this now. Sexy time is over.

She still winds her arms around him tightly as she buries her face into his neck and wails out, “That was so _nice!_ That felt really _nice!”_

He is a little bewildered — but he rolls with it. He mildly says, “Yeah, I thought so, too. Your reaction is a little like — strong — but I’m glad you thought it was nice?” He just continues rubbing her back. He just encases her in the smell of him as he tells her, over and over again, that she is going to be okay and that he loves her. She shakes her head into his neck, because this is the fucking pits — and this is so fucking _amazing._

 

 

 

 


	51. The parents meet the parents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy broadcasts her newfound sexual confidence out into the world! She generally gets smacked back in the face with it, that cutie! Her parents still do not care that much for the love of her life, but they still want to meet the people that made him!

 

 

  
Missy flexes her newfound sexual confidence a little bit, because that seems like something women should do! She’s trying to undo decades’ worth of social conditioning that made her really scared of being sexually assaulted by just any man on the street — as best as she can. She is trying to be more sex positive so that she can be a good example for her nieces as they get older. She ends up sending her buds a group text. She tells them she sort of had some sex! Like, a little bit of it!

Dany’s response is immediate. Dany’s responses on group text either come right away or they never come at all. This is good timing on Missy’s part.

So Dany wants to know what “some sex” even means. Dany wants the specifics so she can deny Missy’s interpretation of her own lived-in experiences, so Dany can decide for herself if any sex actually happened between Missy and Grey.

Dany is Missy’s best friend, so Missy understands that the intentions are good. She knows that Dany is just afraid that Missy is so naive and so inexperienced that she will assume that bad sex or demeaning sex is good sex. Dany doesn’t want her friend to have bad sex.

Missy doesn’t think she is _this stupid_ — but she also knows that Dany is also just responding with her own context. Dany spent many, many years having really bad sex. Missy knows Dany’s super paranoid about this sort of thing.

Missy vigorously hunts around on her phone for some emojis that look like boobs. She easily finds the hand emojis and the red lipstick lips emojis.

As she is doing this, Irri sends a celebratory emoji of a brown person throwing up their hands. Missy is about to let herself get pulled away from trying to be clever with sexual euphemisms to consider starting an epic internal debate about whether or not Irri’s emoji is untoward and whether or not Missy’s going to say something awkwardly to Irri about this.

But then Irri automatically explains: _This is you having some sex!_

Which is okay! That makes sense.

Yara chimes in to straight up say to Missandei: _What? No you didn’t. Pics or it didn’t happen._

Yara is such a hater. But Missy understands it, too. Yara, too, thinks Missandei is a real idiot and could be easily tricked into thinking that something is sex when it truly isn’t. Yara just wants to make sure that her babe Missy had an authentic experience. Yara also cannot say anything real or earnest to save her life, so counterintuitively, Yara has to carry out her mission through insults and naysaying. She thinks that if she pushes out a hard no, Missandei will get annoyed enough to prove the yes so that Yara and Dany can properly vet.

Missy finally hits send on her pictures of oranges, hands, and red feminine lips.

Dany is like: _What is that?_

Yara is like: _???_

Missy has to explain to them. She says that the oranges are boobs. And that the lips are like a mouth making a kissy face. The hands might be self-explanatory?

Yara is like: _Why are the lips red, though? Was he wearing lipstick when he did this to you?_

Dany is like: _Were YOU kissing HIS boobs?_

Yara is like: _Right!? This is unnecessarily confusing_

Dany is like: _OMG JUST TELL US WHAT HAPPENED_

Missy sighs and tells them to just forget it. Her attempts at being cool and being sexually confident have failed. She’ll just go back to work now.

They quickly tell her, no no no noooo. They tell her to hang on a minute and that they are sorry for giving her shit over the emojis. Yara cannot resist shoving in one last dig before she straightens her attitude though. She tells Missandei that Missandei could’ve used melons or the double cherry emojis for tits. But sure. Oranges are okay, too.

“Hey, Missy!” Robbie says as he walks by. “When you have a moment, can you look at the latest proof I just sent you?”

“Oh! Sure!” Missy’s face pretty much catches on fire.

“Cool beans!” he says, as he walks away, blithely unaware of the conversation she’s having with her friends.

After that, she has to duck her face down so that her hair cocoons around her burning face and so that none of her other colleagues can catch her sort of sexting. They can’t catch her because her body language is emitting serious don’t-come-over-here vibes.

Wait, is this sexting? Does this count as sexting? Sexting means sex texting. She is technically texting about sex. Is this a proper usage of this term?

She peeks her face up real quick to see if she can spot Tyrion in the vicinity. She doesn’t see him.

She returns to her screen. Everyone, including Irri, is yelling at her for leaving them hanging.

She shyly and euphemistically tells them that the stuff she and Grey did together was _so nice._ It was like, really nice because he was really sweet and considerate. And it was just really fun and really pleasant. That’s kind of crazy to her, because she has never felt this way before. She’s never like, felt so attracted to someone like this ever before. She’s never understood what it meant to want someone sexually, before this. And she felt sexy! Like, she felt like a sexual being. She felt like he reciprocated, in wanting her back.

Irri is _dying_ on the other end. Irri is tearing up a little bit and is the middle of mindlessly typing out a gazillion hearts out. Yara is losing her mind on the other end. Yara doesn’t want to read about Missandei’s fucking feelings at all. She seriously just wants to know which body parts went where. She is seriously contemplating just texting Grey about this and asking him directly.

Dany is in the middle of the two. She thinks this shit is the most ridiculously cute shit. And she also really wants to know how close they got to Grey giving Missandei head.

Irri’s millions of hearts come through.

And then Yara’s text comes right after. She writes: _Have you seen his stump dick yet? Yes or no?_

And then right after this, Yara writes: _Fuck! I am late for a meeting! Keep talking tho! I’ll read later!_

 

 

  
The thought of displaying her newfound sexual confidence around her parents still makes her want to vomit. Like, she cannot even wear a shirt with too much cleavage around them because she’s afraid that they will start wondering if she is sexually active or maybe she’s just asking to get raped.

So she goes one level lower and, with a lot of overblown, stiff seriousness, she tells Mars and Moss that they were right. Grey _fucks._ Probably. Probably.

She says it kind of defiantly — because she remembers all the times they tattled on her. She remembers all of the times that they reminded her of their father.

Mars looks at her like she has lost her mind — because they are in the middle of McDonald’s watching the kids pelt the shit out of each other with plastic balls. This seems like a weird place to bring this up — just out of nowhere. He doesn’t realize she has spent the last half an hour just ramping up the courage to blurt this out.

In a deadpan, Mars says, “Great. I’m happy you’re getting your rocks off, sis.”

She starts blushing — they both can tell she’s embarrassed because they know her so well. They are both deciding to ignore it.

“So how do you guys fuck? Is it just a lot of oral?” Moss is shaking his head. Because even he feels ridiculous about this, at this point. He says, “I have said that so many times that it is becoming my catchphrase.”

Missy realizes that she’s in over her head — she’s not really ready to have this conversation with her brothers at all. She didn’t anticipate that they’d have follow-up statements and questions. She really _did_ think they’d just stare at her all agog that she is not who they thought she was. She really _did_ think that she’d just do a victory lap after announcing that she is their little sister and she is becoming sexually active again — so they can just _deal with it._

She has underestimated them. She has assumed that they are mirrors of their father. She has been so proud that she has changed — and she didn’t give her brothers any credit for doing the same. She doesn’t realize that they have gone through _a lot_ of sensitivity training at the PD and paid attention to all of it. She didn’t make the connection — that they have mouthy wives who don’t take their shit, because her brothers also grew up frustrated that their mother just constantly took their father’s shit.

She weakly says, “I don’t know. We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

“How far did you get?” Moss asks. He tends to be more curious about this than Mars is. He has a greater capacity to get excessively detailed with stuff like this than Mars does.

Missandei is feeling ultra shy now. She starts squirming in place.

“Like, did he finger you?” Moss blatantly asks. “I feel like that’s something he’d do.” He grins. “Classic Grey!”

“Guys, we’re in McDonald’s right now,” Mars mutters.

“She’s the one that brought this up,” Moss says. “I’m just politely being interested in her life.”

In a meek and small voice, she reluctantly says, “He touched my boobs. With his mouth.”

 _“That’s it?”_ Mars is actually the one who incredulously said that — really loudly. “How long have you guys been together? You’ve been together for like — almost half of a year! What the fuck?”

“We’re going slow,” she says weakly.

“Yeah, apparently.”

“Don’t make her feel bad about this,” Moss says, laying a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Sis, I am happy for you. It was probably very hard for you to chillax enough to let him do that. Good job. I am proud of you.”

 

 

The next time she sees Olenna, she tells Olenna that she and Grey have made a lot of positive progress in their relationship. They’ve had a lot of deep conversations, and they know a lot more about each other now. There’s a lot more comfort and familiarity with one another now. She is slowly still figuring out what it means to love someone — beyond all of the hormonal stuff. She is figuring out what she needs from him in a relationship and what he needs from her in a relationship. Missy tells Olenna that she’s been trying really hard to not like, let her anxiety and insecurities run the show, because she thinks part of what he needs from her is that he needs her to be secure and confident and sure of herself. Missy tells Olenna she’s been working hard to be really cool with the amount of space he sometimes wants from her. His friends and his family matter a lot to him, so he prioritizes time with the other people in his life. She tells Olenna this actually seems really healthy, but sometimes it’s hard because sometimes all she wants is to be with him. But it seems really stupid to just be missing him all the time, so she’s been like, trying to like take on new hobbies, see her own friends, see her own family.

Her parents don’t really understand his desire for autonomy — they don’t understand why he’s not constantly around for family dinners and other get-togethers — so they kind of assume she is doing something wrong in her relationship. So it’s been a little difficult, to shut out that noise and to shut out the doubts. But she has been trying really hard to assume good things. She keeps telling herself that his occasional absence from her life is not due to the fact that she loves him more than he loves her. She’s been telling herself that his occasional absence is empowering, because he is treating her like an adult who can take care of herself. He is treating her like a woman and not like a lovesick teenager.

“And on my part — I actually think I need more affection,” Missandei says. “I have come to realize that I am kind of an affection junkie. I used to think that my desire for affection was neediness and clinginess — and that it was gross and weak, so I had to get over it. But now I’m starting to think that it’s just who I am. So we’ve talked about that. He knows that I want to see him a little bit more. He knows I want more affection from him.”

“That’s so great, Missandei,” Olenna says. “You sound like you’re just doing everything really well and really conscientiously.”

“And I want to have sex with him already,” Missandei grinds out. “He wants to wait though — because, you know.” She points to the general area of her own crotch.

Olenna is like, “I’m sorry?”

Missandei laughs. Like a lunatic. She says, “I like the journey I’ve gone on here. It’s so cosmic. I like how I went from absolutely will not fuck to maybe will fuck if he really needs it to _oh my God,_ must _definitely_ fuck, _why won’t he fuck?"_

 

 

  
He tells his folks that Missandei’s parents invited all of them over for the holiday. He has already given Missandei’s mom a bunch of weak excuses for why his parents cannot come over — that she shat all over. He told her his parents don’t celebrate the holiday — because his family is terrible and they just live to hate on everything that Missandei’s mom holds dear — like family togetherness.

Missandei’s mom like, for real, told him that she can stop her entire family from overtly celebrating the holiday if it will make his family more comfortable. Miss’ mom told him that the children will be disappointed, but they will get over it. She told him that she will cancel the holiday, if that will make him happy. She said it all with this look of death in her unimpressed stare. It made him confide in Missandei later, telling her that people be fucking basic and conventional as shit when they talk about how her cop father and her cop brothers are the scariest motherfuckers in her family. This is untrue. The scariest motherfucker in her family is actually her mother. He feels cold and hopeless inside whenever he has a conversation with her mother.

Miss’ mom made him feel like shit, enough for him to actually ask his parents about this, so that he can go back and report to her that he tried.

He completely expects his parents to be like, da fuck? Hell no.

But his dad actually says, “Sure. What day, what time, and what should we bring?”

His mom is like, “Are they vegetarians? A lot of Naathi I know are vegetarians. Should I make my broccoli soup?”

Grey is like, “The fuck? Guys, you hate this holiday.”

His dad says, “Yeah, it’s a dumb holiday. But it’s nice that her parents invited us over. And you and her are getting all serious and shit. Your mom and me might as well meet the people she comes from.”

This is wildly out of character. When he was dating Alayaya, his parents didn’t once sit down and break bread with Yaya’s family. His parents were always busy working and when they weren’t hustling for money, the last thing they wanted to do was waste their free time making small talk with people who happened to make the person that their son was dating.

Like, this is what his dad told him the one time Grey told his dad that Yaya’s mom wanted to meet them. His dad said no thanks. And then just let Grey run off to go give her that response. Grey had thrown his arms up and asked his dad how the hell he was supposed to tell Yaya’s mom that his parents don’t want to meet them. His dad has said to tell her just like that. Just tell it to her straight. Just be honest. People can handle it. His dad told him that it’s really fucking stupid to do something out of politeness and fear — to engage in something just because he wanted to avoid an awkward conversation. His dad told him to just grow a pair and tell that woman that his parents have no interest in meeting her and her husband.

Alayaya _did not_ handle that response well at all. She was very young. He was very young. She heatedly told him that his dad was an asshole. Grey was torn between wanting to defend his dad and agreeing that yes, his dad is a real asshole. Grey went along with it when she decided for the both of them that he’d lie about this, say that his parents would love to get together for dinner, but there is a sick aunt that they have to care for. They are never in town. His parents ended up stringing along Yaya’s mom for like, months before she got the hint.

“Guys,” Grey says. “Missandei’s folks don’t like me.”

 _“What?”_ his mom says in disbelief, looking at him skeptically like he is dumb and maybe like he just doesn’t know how to read people. She says, “What do you mean her parents don’t like you? _How_ do they not like you?”

“Calm down, Sanaa,” his dad says. “You may think our son shits gold, but there are lots of reasons why people do not like him. He probably said something like an overconfident asshole to Missy's folks a few times, and they probably got sensitive about it.”

Grey points at his dad. “This is accurate. That is exactly what happened.”

“No _shit,_ Nudho,” his dad says. “I’ve known you for your entire life, son.”

“I still don’t like this,” his mom says, crossing her arms. “How do they _not_ love you? You’re such a _sweet,_ kind person.”

“Because I told them I don’t believe in any of the gods and also that marriage is a patriarchal and archaic institution designed to keep people of color and women down.”

 _“Oh,”_ his mom says, raising her brows. “Yeah, that will do it.”

His dad is reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. His dad is beaming. His dad is saying, “I love you so much sometimes, kiddo. The way I love you sometimes is so egotistical. I love you because you remind me of the person I love the most — and that is _me._ I love you because when I look at you, it’s like looking into a less handsome mirror.”

 

 

  
She is a nervous drinker, so she hits the bottle pretty hard in preparation for his arrival with his parents. For her, that means she has a few glasses of wine before they get here. Her brothers give her plenty of shit over it, telling her that she’s such a cute and hysterical idiot for being so nervous about this.

She is right to be nervous. Because it is awkward and disastrous almost right away. When Grey and his folks arrive, his parents both call her sweetie with just _too much warmth,_ and they try to hug her with their entire hearts and souls. She freezes in place and is massively awkward about it because she can _feel_ her parents watching this. And she can _feel_ her parents’ realization — that she has spent a _shit ton of time_ with these people. And they are loving and intelligent and understanding of her in ways that she just fucking _craves_ from her own parents. She _feels_ that her parents are just _bleeding inside_ from this _betrayal._

So her anxiety is definitely ramping up. That is great. It is very consistent and dependable.

When her parents greet Grey, like, her dad shakes Grey’s hand and asks him how he’s doing. Grey tells her parents that he is fine. And that is it. The interaction just ends after that.

Pleasantries are then exchanged between the elders, along with a vase of flowers, and coats are taken. Missy’s mom _thinks_ she is being real cool and magnanimous as she tells Grey’s parents that they already look like they are part of the family — same sort of coloring and look and stuff. Missy’s mom tells them that she was relieved when she met Grey and saw that he isn’t white.

Missy already wants the ground to open up and swallow her whole. Because she likes the crazy thirst on this woman, wanting Missy to just get married off already. Missy also likes that the only thing her mom can think of, to compliment Grey on, is the fact that he is _not white._ Like, that’s the best she can muster.

Her mom is also speaking a lot of Low Valyrian. It’s their shared language, besides the Common Tongue. Her mom is already testing them. In preparation for dinner, her mom has already flippantly said a few really dicey things about Summer Islanders. Mostly how much darker they are than Naathi. Her mom has speculated that because Grey is pretty light-skinned, he is probably at least part Naathi. Which is nice! Because he’s not Summer Islander-dark!

Missy has been _praying_ to a god she doesn’t believe in — that her mom does _not_ say this shit to their faces.

Grey’s mom smiles politely and agrees that no, Grey is not white. And then she reaches out to grab her son’s arm. She is squeezing it in a vice grip. Missandei sees this — so her mom is probably catching this too — so that’s _awesome._

He carefully extracts his arm from his mom’s nails. He wraps it around his mom and gives her a sideways hug. He’s smiling to himself as he gives her a kiss against the side of her head. He knows what his mom is thinking, and it amuses him.

Again, this shit just looks incredibly loving, and they look like they are incredibly close and have a healthy dynamic with each other.

“You two look the same,” Missandei’s mom observes, staring the both of them down like there is nothing else she can see.

“Really?” Grey’s mom says mildly. “We usually don’t hear that very often. People usually say he looks like his dad. His older brother looks like me.”

 

 

 


	52. Dinner is great!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei's parents realize why Grey is the way he is. They also learn that their daughter is in an "alternative" relationship. Moss breaks his mom's heart. Just normal holiday stuff!

 

 

 

Grey realizes too late that he shouldn’t have told his mom that Missandei’s parents don’t like him.

His mom has taken Missandei’s parents’ dislike of him very personally — because she made him. She not only actually _grew him inside of her,_ she also popped him out, fed him with her body, held onto him, loved him, protected him, taught him, guided him, disciplined him, cried for him, hoped for him, worried about him, wondered repeatedly what it would feel like to die for him — all of it. He is a living and breathing piece of her that walks on his own. He is her miracle.

And she _cannot_ believe these people don’t even _like_ her son. And she’s not unreasonable or blind. She does not expect for them to love him yet. But to not even _like him_ — she doesn’t understand this.

Even Azzie — she understands. If a woman’s parents do not like Azzie — that would make sense to her. Azzie’s manner and way of living can be an acquired taste. Azzie has more flaws on paper. He could potentially concern a parent.

In contrast, her younger son has a good job, a good head on his shoulders, is unfailingly conscientious and responsible, is well-spoken, and he is friendly. The only thing she can think of that might negatively stick out about Grey is the fact that he suffered a terrible accident that resulted in the amputation of his penis. If this is the reason why Missandei’s parents don’t like her son — then _fuck them._

Because Missandei’s dad is kind of nervous, too, he kind of forgets Grey’s mom’s name right after he heard it. He remembers Grey’s dad’s name though — probably because Grey’s dad is a doctor and a man. Missandei’s dad starts righting the ship that his wife messed up a little bit by being super friendly with Grey’s dad. He asks Grey’s dad a lot of questions about their family — about what year they came over, the family they had to leave behind, how he became a doctor, where they have lived.

Grey’s mom cannot help but notice that not once has Missandei’s dad made eye contact with her or even looked in her general direction as he asked questions about her life. So she decides to rectify this. She says, “Doesn’t anyone want to know if law school was hard? Okay, I will tell you. It was.”

Grey is rubbing his face. Because this is just nuts. He is not subtle at all, as he mutters, “Ma,” through his hand.

She heatedly says, _“What?”_

Then he backtracks because he hears her tone. He says, “Nothing. Do you want some more water?” as he immediately starts getting up to go grab the water pitcher on the counter.

She is like, “Okay,” even though it drives her a little bit crazy to get checked by her son for doing absolutely nothing wrong. She gives him a look. He generally shrinks. He looks like he’s sorry and like he’s very, very nervous. She sighs and then touches his hand real quickly to let him know she’s over it. Mostly.

She is still so pissed.

So after Grey refills everyone’s glasses, he does nothing for the rest of the night.

He does nothing when his dad boldly brings up Missandei’s dad’s alcoholism and asks how that was treated because that seems like an okay thing to grill someone about after first meeting them.

Grey says nothing when they start talking about crime. He just watches Missandei as she shyly asks her sister-in-law for another refill of wine. He just watches her sneak little sips before quickly wiping her mouth compulsively with her napkin, because she’s paranoid about getting a wine mustache and appearing _too drunk_ at dinner. He thinks that she’s so cute and that he loves her so much. He tries to catch her eye so that she can see him smiling at her. But she is too wrapped up in her internal thoughts. She is just miserable right now.

Moss and Mars report that homicide rates have been going down for decades now, but people generally have the impression that crime is worse than it ever has been because of the twenty-four hour news cycle. Mars flippantly says that that incarceration rates are still very high. He’s actually referring to this as a bad thing, but Grey’s mom is bit overly sensitive right now.

Grey does nothing as his mom starts talking about her most favorite subject ever. She generally shits in all of their faces and tells them that incarceration only accounts for a tiny fraction of the decrease in crime and it’s generally mostly property crime. She tells them that hiring more police also mostly affects just property crime. She tells them more police makes a nominal difference in violent crimes.

Grey does nothing as Missandei’s mom realizes that Grey really _does_ come from a couple of rich, elitist liberals who think they are better than everyone else, people who have some bizarre and hateful vendetta against law enforcement — basically her entire family. Missandei’s mom just _doesn’t understand_ why her daughter is so enamored with this boy and his family. She thinks that she’s been very supportive, in spite of all of her reservations, which she has not voiced once to her daughter. She has bitten her tongue. She has told her daughter that she wants for him to be part of their family. She has repeatedly asked her daughter to bring him around more often because they want to get to know him and understand him. Her daughter keeps treating them like she is ashamed of them. Her daughter keeps hiding the boy from them. And now Missandei's mom has to sit in her own home on this holiday and just watch these people flaunt their lives and _her daughter’s affection_ for them right in _her face._ It is so _disrespectful._

Moss tries to dispel some of the awkwardness by shooting the shit with Grey’s dad. It does not go great. Moss is also tipsy, and Moss’ over-familiarity with his elders unfortunately reminds Grey’s dad a lot of Drogo, especially when Moss tries to be funny by telling Grey’s dad that Azzie used to be his dealer — so that’s how he knows Grey apart from Missandei. Moss and Azzie were really good friends. And the last time Azzie was in town, Moss caught the two of them with drugs as he was getting off work.

Everyone is like, _what,_ over this story. Grey is glaring daggers at Moss. Grey’s parents stiffen, because they did not expect to bluntly be reminded of the fact that their oldest son was a low-level drug dealer and also a college dropout. Missy’s parents did not expect to learn that Grey’s older brother is apparently a criminal?

In the Common Tongue, Mars says, “Guys, weed is legal now. It’s fine.” He’s trying to smooth things over.

The rest of them are quickly discovering what Missandei already knows, that Grey’s parents are different from her parents on a fundamental level. Like, Grey’s parents think it’s weird that Missandei’s mom is doing all of the work as the rest of them park their asses at the table and shout orders at her. Grey’s dad is the kind of guy to like, call this out. So after he asks about it, it gets mega awkward. Like, really, really awkward.

They have an entire conversation about the division of household after that. Missandei’s mom says stuff about what a woman’s role is. Grey’s mom is like, oh excuse me what? Grey’s mom tells them that she taught her boys to do ‘womanly’ stuff like how to cook, clean, and how to talk about their emotions in a productive way. Missy’s mom interprets this as like, aggression and criticism on her own parenting. She tells Grey’s mom that she taught her sons to be leaders and to be strong, family-oriented men who provide for their wives and children.

Grey’s mom immediately gets offended. She tells them all that Grey is actually at the top in his field. He is also a leader. And he is also _sensitive._ He is both. Men can be both. They can be _sensitive_ and they can be _leaders._

Grey just really wishes his mom would stop calling him sensitive over and over in front of everyone. It is actually making him feel sensitive.

Missy’s mom pointedly asks Grey’s mom what her oldest son does for a living.

And Moss cuts in real fast here. He is still trying to alleviate the tension. He asks his own mother if she’s frustrated that her youngest son has no ambition or desire to climb the ranks, if she is frustrated that her youngest son got his job through nepotism.

She is not amused at all.

Grey is touched though. Moss throwing himself in front of the bullet makes up for pretty much all of the times in the recent past that Moss really fucked Grey over. Grey reaches over the table to try and high-five Moss, but Grey’s dad lightly slaps the back of his head and asks Grey if he thinks this is really an appropriate time for his shit.

Missandei’s dad actually laughs at that. Missandei’s dad quietly tells Grey’s dad that kids are impossible to control. They just end up being who they are.

His dad says, “They do. Like, we were both afraid he’d be severely depressed and suicidal as he grew up, or he’d start killing animals or young women for sexual gratification —”

Mars is shocked into laughing.

“— but it ended up working out! He’s just a normal person for the most part.”

The entire table goes silent for a beat — as everyone basically just absorbs what was just said. Missandei is gripping the edge of the table tightly and clenching her teeth. Her brothers are casting quick glances between their parents. And their parents are aggressively confused.

“So you guys don’t know about his accident,” Grey’s dad surmises.

Missandei’s dad then says, “What accident?”

Grey drops his gaze to the table. He says, “Oh my God.”

Missandei is like, _“Nooo,”_ as she continues to grip the table hard. “Please don’t.”

Even Mars and Moss look totally scared. They look like deer caught in headlights. They both have refrained from talking about Grey’s penis stuff in front of their parents, because they have a modicum of decency.

Grey’s dad doesn’t. Grey’s dad says, “That’s crazy they haven’t told you —”

Missy’s dad smile is strained, but his voice is forcefully cheery. He says, “It’s okay. They’re entitled to privacy. I know Missandei tells me what I need to know!” He shoots his daughter’s panicked face a soft look. He’s trying to convey to her it’s going to be okay — whatever the fuck it is.

She is shaking her head.

Grey says, _“Dad,”_ as his dad just fucking ignores him.

His dad is irritated that Grey kept this a secret — because he’s not supposed to be ashamed of it. He’s not supposed to let the opinions of close-minded people affect him because _fuck them all._ Grey’s dad looks at his counterpart at the table, and he wonders what it is about this man that makes everyone so fucking afraid of him. He is just a person, like anyone else. Grey’s dad doesn’t understand why his son is being like this — why his son is bending over backwards trying to get the approval of this man.

His own father-in-law hated him, because he was untraditional. It did not even matter that he vowed to spend his entire life making her happy. Her happiness didn’t even matter to her father. Appearances did. Grey’s dad does not buy into any of that shit. So he does not see that there is any deficiency or shamefulness in his kid. His son is just perfect.

He says, “Yeah, he got penis ripped right off when he was twelve. We were really afraid it would really mess him up psychologically. But he turned out okay.”

This makes Grey so pissed. He is just so fucking _pissed._ He is _so pissed_ that his dad keeps insisting that there is only one right way for him to live his own fucking life. He is pissed that he cannot even have one thing to himself for one fucking moment. His dad constantly has to take his privacy away from him. He is so angry that he is saying nothing to his dad. All he can do is stare.

In Summer Tongue, his dad tells him that he knows that Grey is pissed, but these people are just not better than Grey is.

Grey says that he _knows this,_ fucking shit. He tells his dad that his current problem is not fucking one of confidence. He just wants to feel like a _human being_ sometimes, and not like _walking trauma._

His dad is like, oh, _oops._ His dad says that’s a good point, and that he has made a small error in judgement.

To Missandei, Moss asks, “What are they saying right now?”

In annoyance, Missandei says, “I’m not translating.”

 

 

  
The revelation about Grey’s lack of penis has to be backburnered because the kids all just _go nuts_ about penises and vaginas. The kids are at the phase in life where they are just _obsessed_ and curious about private parts. Chako announces to the table that he and Kaden have penises. Their dads and uncles, too. The girls both cop to the fact that they do not have penises, just vaginas. They state that their mommies and auntie and grandma have vaginas, too. And boobies! And they gleefully reiterate that their brothers and daddies and uncles and grandpa have penises.

Chako stands up on his chair and tries to show them all his penis, but Moss stops him — reminding his kid that he always gets so embarrassed when he shows other people his penis that he starts crying over it — so maybe he should skip over the meltdown tonight. To the adults, Moss tells them that Chako’s been a little excessive about this, and they have been called into school about this once because Chako and his friend were caught slapping each other’s dicks at recess. They had climbed a fence to get some privacy. That was a big part of the reason parents were called in.

Moss’ own mother is completely _mortified_ that the conversation at her holiday dinner has become so _inappropriate._ She is still _reeling_ from the revelation that Grey isn’t a real man. She is trying to maintain control over _something in her life,_ as she focuses on admonishing her sons for not being in better control of their children. She keeps snapping at Moss and telling him to teach Chako better, or else Chako will grow up perverted.

She means gay.

Missandei groans in humiliation. Mars raises his brows as he braces himself for what is going to follow. Moss and Safi actually just get ticked off. Because this is actually an old, tiring, ongoing argument that they keep having — with both sets of grandparents. Moss is already anticipating the fight that he will have with his wife over this later because she gets sick of his mother’s intrusiveness and she gets reluctant to let his parents babysit when his mom says shit like this around the kids. Moss doesn’t think he can ever tell his parents that they have to spend less time with the kids if they don’t stop spewing their bullshit. Safi thinks her husband is being real chickenshit sometimes. That is the basis of their fights on this.

Moss tells all of the kids to — seriously — clear their plates at the sink and then just go the fuck away and go play somewhere else.

They all immediately do this — because they are excited to. They were all honestly so freaking bored during dinner because all adults do is talk.

After the kids disappear amid a bunch of loud shouting and running, Moss’ mom haughtily refers to him by his full name and tells him he should not swear at the children or else they’ll pick up this bad habit —

And Moss _blows up._ He is stressed out by his mom. He is stressed out by this fucking dinner. He is stressed out by his sister, who is practically _vibrating_ from her anxiety right next to him. He is stressed out that everyone keeps looking at him like he is a villain for jokingly telling a harmless story about his former weed dealer who is obviously not a terrible person for being really fucking entrepreneurial while still in high school.

Moss tells his mom he honestly does not give a shit if his kids picks up all of his _terrible habits,_ like how he shows up for them and spends time with them and pushes himself to exhaustion going to all of of their boring shit just to watch their under-talented asses play the triangle in a school musical performance. His terrible habit is that he _talks_ and _explains_ shit to his kids instead of just screaming at them all the time.

Moss actually meant to burn his mom with this condemnation, but he accidentally ended up mostly burning his dad instead.

It doesn’t matter. Both of his parents are already recoiling from the blow.

 

 

  
Their mom looks like she wants to burst into tears, but after a short struggle, she just maintains her poker face and gives Moss and the rest of her kids the silent treatment — they’re ingrates, all of them. She doesn’t even know who to talk to anymore. So she turns to Grey’s mom and tells the woman that she likes her sweater.

“Oh, thank you. Grey got this for me. He said it was on sale.” And then after a pause — because she realizes that she is making her son sound _really cool —_ she adds, “I don’t like it when he pays retail on things. I’d rather he save his money.”

Their mom really dramatically says, “I can’t remember the last time my children gave me anything besides heartbreak.”

Moss mutters, “Oh my _God,”_ because his mother is insane.

Mars sighs and decides to push logic at her. He says, “Mom, we brought you shit to open like, _today._ You have a shit ton of presents from all of us.”

Their mom ignores them. She has decided that Grey’s parents win. They obviously win because they have the better children — even if one of their children is a drug dealer. He probably actually loves his mother and probably calls her all the time to talk to her. He is probably never condescending to her and never talks to her like she is an uneducated, old-fashioned idiot that has no wisdom to give, even after she has given up _her entire life_ over to a bunch of ingrates.

Grey’s parents decide to leave soon after. Because they think that witnessing this family’s sudden implosion is enough holiday cheer for them. The three of them quickly get up and start clearing plates — Grey starts washing dishes amid a bunch of protest from Missandei’s mom. But his mom just tells the other woman to let him do it. He’s good at it, and it’s relaxing to just sit back and let him work.

His parents shrug into their coats before they boldly just go around hugging everyone. They hug the boys and tell them that they are great and all the stories about them don’t do the reality justice at all. They hug all the kids, who take a break from play to say goodbye. They hug Missandei’s dad and tell him that his home and his family are very lovely. They hug Missandei’s mom and tell her that kids are just fucking terrible and ungrateful sometimes — it’ll be okay. They hug Missandei and tell her they love her very much. The words roll off effortlessly, like it is a normal goodbye for them — and it is a stab in the heart for Missandei’s mother, hearing this.

For this reason, she forces herself to embrace Grey. It is really terrible and awkward because he looks so scared and confused when she wraps her arms around him. He lightly pats her on the back and says, “Uh, good to see you, as always.”

Grey hesitates when he has to say goodbye to Missandei. He starts to reach for her — but then he just gets _massively_ psyched out by her mom’s stare. He just gives up and retreats. He gives her a small wave and a closed-mouth smile from a healthy distance away. He politely says, “Bye. It was also good to see you.”

She straight up says, “See you later — I love you,” in front of all of their family members.

It embarrasses him so hard. He just mutters something indecipherable that sort of sounds like, “I love you, too” — _sort of —_ before he flushes in heat, turns around, and grabs the car keys from his dad.

 

 

  
For the rest of the night, their family just pretends that everything is normal — for the sake of the kids — as they watch the kids open presents. Missandei’s parents watch their daughter play with her nieces and nephews and their new toys, in the midst of crumpled wrapping paper.

They are thinking that they did not anticipate this at all. When they were young and planning out the future together, they both figured that their daughter would already be married by this age. They thought she’d already have a beautiful family at this age — that she’d have children already. Missandei’s dad thought she’d meet a traditional man who would love her and care for her. Missandei’s mom thought that once Missandei became pregnant, there would be so many things that she could teach her daughter, things they would bond over.

They both feel that this dream is just dying in front of their faces right now. It just keeps dying in front of their faces. It is an iterative pain that keeps manifesting and re-manifesting in different ways, worsening and worsening each time.

 

 

  
It is past midnight when she sneaks her way into and through his dark apartment. When she arrives at his bedroom, she starts talking off some of her clothes — her socks, her pants, her bra. She shuts the door to the bathroom quickly behind her so that she doesn’t wake him up with the light. She brushes her teeth, washes her face, wraps her hair up, and pees before exiting.

The bed is warm from his body heat when she crawls in. He groans as he slowly wakes up, in spite of her careful ministrations. She feels him cup her bottom lightly, as she rolls over and kisses him. His kisses are slow and sluggish as he continues to wake up — then they go harder and wetter as he slips his tongue into her mouth and squeezes her ass.

When they break apart, he whispers to her. He says, “I got you something.”

It’s not what she is expecting at all. She says, “Huh?”

He is reaching across her, to open a drawer in his nightstand, picking out an envelope before shutting the drawer again.

He drops the envelope on her stomach before he collapses back down into the mattress. He yawns.

She says, “This is a present?”

He says, “Yeah.”

She holds the envelope in her hand, weighing it. She says, “But you don’t celebrate this holiday.”

He chuckles. “I know. But you do. So I got you something.”

She actually says, “What the heck! I didn’t get you anything. Because I thought you don’t celebrate this holiday. I feel like an ass for not getting you anything!”

“I still _don’t_ celebrate this holiday,” he says. “And it’s cool, Miss. It’s actually a present for the both of us.”

She says, “Oh, so you like, put sex in an envelope?”

His laugh is louder now — more alert.

She rips open the envelope with her thumb. It’s too dark for her to read what she is looking at — but she can tell from the shape and the thickness of the paper. She can tell from the perforation. She says, “You got me concert tickets. We’re going to a concert. I finally got my shit straight.” She blinks rapidly — because this night was really just utterly terrible — and somehow he is making it rebound. She is wondering how he even _does this_ all the time?

His arm winds around her. He’s pulling her to him. He can’t tell that she is getting emotional about a present designed to be both a romantic callback to before they started dating _and_ a dig at her dicey taste in music. He kisses the side of her face. He sleepily says, “Yep.”

 

 

 

 

 


	53. Grey meets Alayaya's new beau

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey gets annoyed by his ex, and then annoyed by his ex's new guy. Missandei tells the love of her life that he is sometimes a huge jerk and implies that he only gets away with it because he is so charming and funny. Grey learns no new lessons about his behavior in this chap. And then Missy tries to park her ass somewhere it might not yet belong.

 

 

So Grey learns that he is actually not in charge of one woman’s sexual awakening at all. He was actually kind of idiotic and paternalistic for entertaining the very idea. This woman’s sexual awakening is just fucking _happening no matter what,_ without his fucking input and his expressed desire.

It happens because when she sees that the world doesn’t come crashing down all around them whenever he touches her breasts and she sits on top of him, Missandei just stops giving as many shits about her hang ups. She stops telling herself that she is not designed for sex. She stops telling herself that sex is terrifying and world-ending.

She starts becoming bolder and bolder. She starts asking him questions about his body, hungrily drinking up the information. She straight-up tells him why she wants to know — it’s because she is preparing. She is prepping for when she makes him lose his mind. He has to press his hand over her mouth so that she would shut up already, because she is _too good_ at bedroom talk.

She asks him questions outside of the bedroom, too. She talks to him about sex when they are grabbing breakfast, when they are shopping together, and when she is bored on the very short drive to his parents’ house. She repetitively asks him a number of questions about how he masturbates. She asks him a bunch of questions about how he derives pleasure. She wants to know if it’s via pressure points on his foot or nipple stuff _or what._

He is stunned.

He tells her that it’s not through his foot. He is confused over where her mind is at, as he tells her that it’s through the penis — or what is left of the penis. This seems really obvious to him — but the relief that comes over her face when he reveals this to her just makes him feel _weird._

Unlike Missandei, he is still very, very scared about sex. He still thinks that it could be world-ending. Like, it would end his world if she sees his genitals and then, incrementally, withdraws from him over the course of weeks or months, all the while lying to him and telling him that it’s not his body at all that is repulsive to her — it’s just maybe they are just not working out for the multitude of reasons that it sometimes doesn’t work out for couples. He has gone online and read a bunch of terrifying confessions from straight women about all the ways they secretly wish their boyfriend’s small penis was much bigger. And he doesn’t even have a small penis. He has like, no penis.

He kind of talks to Yara about this. Who can sort of relate — on account of dating a number of straight girls who eventually rejected her for her lack of dick, who were too cowardly to say it straight up and messed her up a little bit by blaming it on her cold, cold, unlovable personality.

Yara tells him a part of her still worries that Obara is going to leave her one of these days, because she doesn’t have a dick. She tells him that this is a legit problem — this is the insecurity that will always come out when one dates a cisgender, straight girl. Yara tells him that a crazy part of her still thinks that Obara is at least, in part, dating her because Obara is still trying to piss off her dad. Like, these insecurities don’t ever fully go away. They just get quieter.

In response to her truth, he is like, _oh great, thanks a lot, Yara._

Missandei is not really very concerned with his insecurities. At this point, she thinks that they are unfounded and they also reflect an insecure lack of trust in her and in them. She has told him she loves him, all of him. She has told him the penis thing really doesn’t matter to her.

He keeps doing this incredibly frustrating thing — he keeps inferring that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that she doesn’t know what dwells in her subconscious. When he infers stuff like this, she wants to punch him in the face.

She has gotten tired of the circular nature of this particular conversation. Honestly, they won’t fully know unless he takes the risk and they sit in the aftermath. He won’t be fully reassured with words at all. She now intimately understands why he resents feeling like he has to give out words of reassurance when she is being insecure. She now understands why he’d rather she just deal with her shit herself, because that is truly the only way to move past it.

She understands because she is just _sick of this shit_ already. She is sick of talking about it. She is sick of trying to convince him that she is not a shitty person. She is sick of repeatedly telling him that the way she loves him transcends this terrible thing that happened to him when he was young. She just wants to shake him and tell him to get the fuck over it. Just get the fuck _over it_ and _get naked_ in front of her already.

She tells him it’s been six months. They’ve been dating for about six months.

“Can I just see it?” she asks him desperately, reaching for the drawstring of his sweatpants. “Maybe it’ll help you feel better about having sex with me if I just can see it.”

He grabs her wrists. He laughs nervously. He says, “Stop.” As easy and light as he tries to keep it — his eyes still flash panic and fear at her.

She is starting to think that this is simultaneously getting worse as it also gets better. The more attached to her that he becomes, the harder and the greater the risk will be for him — in getting naked in front of her. Sometimes she is reckless with his feelings because she is so turned on by him. She tells him to just _give it up_ already, see what happens. Because he might just lose her anyway, if he keeps delaying this.

It sounds super threatening and not very cool of her. She always has to quickly apologize for this blurt when it comes out. She has to tell him she is just made a lunatic because he is withholding sex. She tells him of course she is _deep_ in this relationship. She tells him of course she will continue waiting because she loves him _so much._

‘So much’ is a new part of her vocabulary with him.

 

 

  
He has to have dinner with the accountant and participate in an entire production of it. Alayaya basically just annoys _the shit_ out of him with constant texting and a constant barrage of telling him what his problem is. He is glad that they still have this dynamic together.

She tells him that he’s being such a man about this. He doesn’t even want to expend the energy to text-yell at her to ask her what the fuck she _even means_ because he is actually not being unreasonable about this. He is down to meet the accountant. They can meet at a fucking party or some fucking gathering. Grey just doesn’t think that they need to make a huge deal about this and create a dinner party with the sole intent of _just_ introducing the guy to their group of friends. He thinks that this is classic Yaya. Grey also thinks it’s real weird that Alayaya so urgently wants Grey, a person she used to have sex with, to meet the accountant, the person she’s currently having sex with. Like, what is the fucking point of this?

Alayaya tells him that there’s a double standard happening here. Everyone got to meet Missandei and everyone was like, excited about that. No one is excited to meet Cameron at all. And that is because Alayaya is a woman.

Grey tells her that first — he didn’t fucking throw a dinner party to showcase Missandei to the rest of them. They met her at Drogo’s party. And then he brought her to Tal’s party. The dynamic there was totally different. Also, people were excited to meet the new person Grey is dating not because he is a man. It was because he was _crushed_ after the breakup and their friends just wanted to see evidence that he is happy and has moved on.

Alayaya snottily writes: _So I get to wear a scarlet A on my chest and be punished for it forever, because of this one fucking terrible mistake I made when I was in my early 20s?_

Grey writes: _You are also high strung, and sometimes people just want to feel relaxed._

When he recaps this entire shit to Missandei, he finds that Missandei already knows all about it. Because she has evidently been talking to Yaya. Not only that, but she actually agrees with Yaya and is fucking siding with _her._

In response to this, Missandei patiently says, “Grey, there are no sides, babe. She’s just really stressed out because she really likes this guy, and she really cares about your opinion. And literally, all you need to do is show up to a dinner that she is organizing. You are being kind of a jerk about it — when all she asked you to do is show up. She didn’t like, solicit your opinion on _what kind of party_ should be thrown, babe.”

Grey says, “Oh my God, _what?”_

 

 

  
So they all have dinner at Alayaya’s condo. She orders food because she’s not a good cook and she never had the patience nor the inclination to learn. Tal raises his brows at the spread, throws some shade because he’s a professional cook, and is like, _really?_ Grey nods in agreement over this — if they were gonna order in, why the holy fuck are they not in a restaurant right now?

Alayaya thinks that they are both being the biggest douchebags. She tries to make them feel bad by telling them that her lack of wifeliness was one of the things that her ex-husband threw back in her face when he was on his way out of her life. She tells them that, for this reason, she is even more resolved to stay a shitty cook.

Grey will not be made to feel bad about this shit. He just crosses his arms and says, “Oh.”

The accountant — Cameron — seems like a nice, normal person. He has a five-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, and he owns his own business — possibly one of the things he and Alayaya found interesting about one another.

They have a relatively nice and steady dinner party — slightly on the boring side — until Alayaya goes, “Oh!” like she remembers something.

Then she tells them that Muffin is pregnant. She tells them it was a complete surprise to her, when the vet told her.

When Missandei hears this, she is like, “Oh no.”

She says it right before Grey evenly says, “Muffin wasn’t _spayed?”_ and everyone around the table, _except_ for Cameron because Cameron doesn’t know any better, _flinches._

Grey’s friends and Missandei all know that he is weirdly passionate about spaying and neutering pets because he is weirdly passionate about pet abandonment and homelessness. It’s not weird that he cares. It’s just weird _how much_ he cares and how judgmental he gets about it.

Alayaya rises to the challenge. She says, “No, she isn’t.” Alayaya starts arguing about her dog’s health. She makes the fatal mistake of telling Grey that there is some research that suggests spaying dogs is bad for them because it alters their personality and puts them at a higher risk for cancer.

Grey goes nuts at that. He goes from level one reasonable to level ten batshit. He says, “Do you also think that vaccines cause _autism?_ Do also you think the Earth is _flat?_ Do you also think that global warming is something the liberal media _made up?_ Do you also think that slaves like being enslaved and that’s why slavery is so pervasive — because it’s _so fun?”_

Kojja lightly coughs into her wine glass, fogging it up, but she is otherwise unfazed. She mutters, “Holy shit,” as Xhondo, Balaq, and Tal just start cracking up.

Cameron tries to break it up — because Alayaya is his woman now — and everyone here is old friends. And friends shouldn’t fight like this. So Cameron deepens his voice on purpose and then suggests that they just agree to disagree and just move on so everyone can have a nice dinner. Cameron says, “It’s really not worth getting heated about.”

Grey is honestly so disgusted by this — on so many levels. His friends are all laughing or smiling, so they all obviously think he’s hilarious. He thinks that agreeing to disagree is what stupid people who don’t know how to critically think do. He hates the way Cameron’s voice sounds. He hates being told to let everyone have a nice dinner — like he is the asshole that is stopping people from having a good time just because he gives a shit about something and _caring_ is apparently a crime.

This is some _weakass_ shit.

He _does_ let it go without further comment though, because Missandei’s nails are digging into his thigh underneath the table. He winces. He grabs her hand down there. He squeezes it. And then he pries it off his leg before he loosens his hold and entwines their fingers together. He doesn’t get why she is trying to stop him from being full-force awesome right now — but it is fine.

 

 

  
By the time dinner is over, Alayaya remembers why they are no longer together. It is because he’s an asshole who just cannot let shit go. Grey also remembers why they are no longer together. It’s because she hates facts. They still hug each other goodbye and kiss each other on the cheek. They still make a wildly inappropriate joke about how they used to have sex together.

This is the first time Cameron has heard anything like this — and he _does not_ like it. His face becomes pinched, and he squares his shoulders when Grey goes to say goodbye to him. He has a few inches and maybe fifteen pounds on Grey. He is thinking that — if it ever came down to it — he could probably beat Grey’s ass.

Grey rolls his eyes. Because this guy is a hypermasculine, posturing idiot who seems to be really good at Excel spreadsheets and who loves to make money. Big fucking deal. Completely seems like Alayaya’s type. Good for them. He does not think about kicking Cameron’s ass at all. He just thinks that if push came to shove, he could probably figure out some things to say to really hurt Cameron’s feelings.

Missandei is better at handling the inappropriate sex jokes now. Because she knows that Alayaya and Grey are _dysfunctional._ It makes sense to her, now. Also, she’s a lot less insecure and jealous now! She knows that Grey wants to have sex with her and only her now!

In the car, she explains it to him. She tells him that he was a real jerk — and it hurt Alayaya’s feelings. Missandei tells him that when his friends met her, all of them, including Yaya, were all just _so nice_ to her. So it’s just not cool if Grey is not nice and not polite to Yaya’s new guy. Being a jerk makes him look petty and classless.

“The fuck?” he says to her. “That’s your _logic?_ She was nice to you so I have to be nice to that idiot?”

“It’s respectful —”

“Nah, fuck that,” he says. “People are nice to you because you are lovely and awesome. I’m a little curt to that guy because he has a weak chin, and I don’t like looking at it.”

“Grey!” she exclaims — as she works _so hard_ to suppress her laugh. “That’s so mean!”

“Babe,” he says. “I just can’t help how I _feel.”_

 

 

  
She puts forth some effort at trying to explain to him why it’s cool to be a nice person and why it’s uncool to be a real self-righteous asshole — and he keeps mocking her over it. Like, he keeps asking her when she became the arbiter of cool. Like, is she cool now? Like, is this now a character trait that she has now?

He is cracking her up — he is making her laugh so hard by proving his own point, by being a complete jerk.

She giggles as she shuts her front door and tells him that he’s so much like his dad sometimes — it is crazy. She presses her hand to his chest, pushing him down to her sofa. She tells him that _he actually knows_ how frustrating it is, to be a victim of his father’s self-righteousness — so _why_ does he even _do this_  to other people?

He is sitting down and smiling up at her, as he says, “Because it feels _so good.”_

This is when the nature of their rapport flips. She _hears_ the double meaning. She _feels_ her body heat up against his gaze. She can _see_ the way he is looking up at her.

So she sits on him, on her couch. She quickly divests herself of her shirt and her bra. She takes off his shirt, too, before smashing their chests together. He groans and she releases a pleased sigh. This is one way she tries to sway and inspire him into having sex with her.  
  
“So, Grey,” she asks him primly. “How exactly do you fuck?”

He groans again, his hands automatically grab onto her ass, and she smiles as she bites into his neck. This is actually something old by now — it is an old, recurring question. She already knows the answer to it by this point. Now it is just a funny, stupid, sexy thing that she says to him from time to time.

He says, “I fuck just like anyone else, except for _better.”_

“Yeah?” she whispers to him.

“Yeah,” he says, as his mouth hovers over hers.

And then he laughs — right into her face. He laughs and he dryly says, “I love how I’m just shooting myself in the face, over and over again, with that joke. Expectations are high now, aren’t they?”

She ignores how funny he thinks he is. Instead, she asks him, “How would we fuck? Is it just a lot of oral?”

He looks at her blankly, as he thinks that it’s just so fucking weird that Missandei keeps quoting her older brother when she’s trying to get sex.

Grey’s answer has shifted over time. He used to avoid the question. And then he started answering logistically.

Nowadays, he blithely responds by blindly cupping her breast. He asks, “How do _you_ usually fuck?” as he smears the heel of his hand over her nipple. “Is it just a lot of penetration? Does that do it for you?”

She bites down on her bottom lip — to hold in a sound. She gets so frustrated with him sometimes. She does not even give a shit anymore. She thinks that he is being so ridiculous. She thinks that he is so _fucking hot._ She says, “Oh my God, baby,” as she breaks the tension by groaning into his neck. She whispers. “Let’s just do a little bit. You can keep your clothes on. You can just do sex stuff on me.” She whispers, “Come _on.”_

“Okay, okay, okay,” he says, making a flair of hope just bloom inside of her before he straightens up, knocking her off of his chest a little bit. “Thanks for the generosity of allowing me to do sex stuff on you while I keep my clothes on.” He’s laughing at her now.

He jokingly tells her that maybe she was right when they first toyed with the idea of dating, maybe the better idea is just to never have sex with each other. He strokes her face and he tells her that all of the other stuff is really nice — maybe the other things are nice enough.

She says, “You’re such an asshole,” as she runs her mouth over his, as she holds his head in place with her hand. “You’re only saying that to punish me for all of the mistakes that I have made with you.”

“I’m honestly not withholding sex to punish you,” he says — as he drops his hand from her breast — because sometimes he’s scared that the things they say as they are joking around feel too truthful. “I’m holding back because I’m scared as shit still. You know that, right?”

“Baby, ugh.” She groans, as she runs her hands over his cheeks to hold onto them. She gives his nose a quick nuzzle with hers, as she says, “I _know._ I was just trying to be sexy with you. Ugh, you’ve made it all serious.”

For the next twenty minutes, they alternate between making out and trying to grope each other in ways that make the both of them feel safe and comfortable — so her hands go all over the exposed areas of his body like his chest, his back, his stomach — and it is not enough. It is not enough at all. She finds there’s something unequal in the way their bodies are set up.

His hands and his mouth travel all over her chest until she is panting and starting to beg for just a little bit more. He keeps wondering what the fuck he can do to graduate this up a little bit, but not too much. He is trying to amp himself up to putting his hand under and up her skirt in a safe way, when she just takes action and takes matters into her own hands. She stands up and flips around and tries to sit her ass in his lap.

Grey makes the fatal of mistake of getting a little freaked out over the sudden turn of events — over her sudden burst of courage — that he blurts out, “Whoa, what are you doing?”

And this feedback completely rips her confidence away from her. She freezes — like she has done something terribly wrong and completely unsexy — like put her fucking ass into his crotch. She just plays out her embarrassment by letting her body slink off of him — letting it slink completely off the couch. She is covering her hot face. She mutters, “I’m sorry. Oh man, I am sorry.”

As he leans over and tries to pick her back up and pull her back into his lap — as he is trying to fucking _undo_ what he just did, he is saying, “Baby, baby, _babe — Miss — baby —_ I am like, so fucking _sorry._ Shit, I didn’t mean to say _that_ to you.” There’s no easy way for him to turn her around so that he can look her in the face, because she refuses to support her own bodyweight right now.

She is still covering her face, as she lets her limp body get pulled back into his warmth, as her bare back touches his bare chest. Her voice is muffled as she says, “I’m sorry, I really should’ve asked you before I tried to put my butt right there. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says, his voice low and just ticked at himself. He is hugging her body tightly to his as he says, “I completely overreacted. You tried something new, and it was cool and brave. I freaked out a little bit because my brain was like, ahhh, I hope you’re not expecting a dick there because there’s not going to be one!”

She whimpers. Because this is so mortifying. For the both of them. She softly admits, “I wasn’t expecting a dick there. I didn’t like, suddenly forget.”

“I know,” he says quickly. Because this conversation is actually the worst. “I figured. I just got . . . really self-conscious there.”

“I feel embarrassed,” she admits — and it is like, a painful admission even though it really shouldn’t be. Like, she is embarrassed about something just about all the time. Like, she should be used to this shit by now. She tells him that she feels embarrassed that she is topless and in his arms and just being comforted by him because she is bad at sex. This is the stuff of her nightmares.

It is awkward after that, when their skin starts getting sweaty from being stuck together. It is a real bummer to pull apart from each other and feel chilly as the air hits the accumulated perspiration on their bodies. She bends over to retrieve her bra, her shirt, and his shirt. They get dressed silently — only to realize that their clothes have to come off again — in the course of getting ready for bed.

As he brushes his teeth, after she puts moisturizer on her face, she randomly hugs him from behind. She presses her nose into his spine and smells his laundry detergent. He looks at her holding onto him through the mirror and presses his palm over her hand on his chest.

 

 

 


	54. Grey's mom is a really good mom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missandei goes a little nuts because she has issues with her parents. Same old thang. This time though, she is more communicative and thus, draws everyone into her vortex of bitterness and anger. The love of her life isn't into it and tries to put up healthy boundaries. But Missy is like, "What's your problem!?" about it. The love of her life then goes running to his mommy because he has a good relationship with his mom. His mom then gives him real solid advice.

  

 

  
She never thought that she’d miss her parents’ desperation for her to be married — not until it is replaced with deafening, protracted avoidance. When she shows up to dinner, sans Grey, neither her mom or her dad asks about him. Her mom doesn’t give her criticism for not being an accommodating-enough woman, for not being a woman that makes a man feel manly. Her mom just says a whole lot of nothing. And it’s not even like her mom is still mad. It’s like her mom is in denial. It is like he never even existed.

This has echoes of the years when her dad was just a broken scumbag, and they were all telling their mom to just _leave him already_ — because they were basically almost grown so their mom might as well just save herself and live out the rest of her days happier than what their dad was giving her.

During that period of time in Missy’s late teens and early twenties, her mom was just _huge_ on acting like everything was normal and like there was nothing amiss. She cooked dinner for her husband every night. She mended his clothes. They talked about the children and various home projects before bed and on weekends. Not a word was said about the huge chunks of money that went missing from their bank account. Not much was said about the nights he just didn’t come home.

Rather, explosive anger got misplaced and came randomly, sometimes when Mars didn’t comprehensively scrape off his plate before placing it in the sink. It came when Moss wore his pants too low and a few sizes too big. It came whenever Missandei walked out of her room in clothes that she thought were normal. There were probably a number of years when all their mother saw when she looked at her children were her husband’s flaws and his ongoing betrayal.

“The fish is a little overcooked, yes?” their mom asks them.

No one answers her — none of her kids do, at least. This is why Zoya, who is just going nuts underneath the tension, is the one who says, “It’s fine. Very tasty.”

“I saw Marjani at the Naathi market today,” their mom continues casually. “Do you know what she say to me? She says her son Zinash is coming back home for a little while. He’s divorced now. Wife was terrible — married for green card. Can you believe?”

After a bunch of non-responses and non-interest from the rest of the table, their mom presses on. She says, “Missandei, you remember Zinash? He was a very nice boy. He’s an engineer. Maybe you can show him around town. I will give you his phone number. I already gave Marjani yours.”

This is what breaks her out of the silent treatment she is giving her mom. This is the statement that makes her go, “Uh, _excuse me?”_

 

 

Missandei continues being angry and resentful in a way that her brothers do not completely understand. Maybe it’s because her rage is currently so specific and so feminine.

At Mars’ house, because the three of them have started up their own special family dinners once a month so they can talk shit about their parents to each other, Missandei bitterly tells her brothers what they already know. She tells them that their mom would rather she hook up with a boring Naathi divorcee that she doesn’t have feelings for then be with someone amazing who actually makes her happy. Like, that’s where their mom’s _fucking priorities_ are.

Missandei sarcastically tells her brothers that she imagines that Mom and Dad would completely be okay with her being with a man who just beats the everloving shit out of her — as long as he has a dick, right? It’s fine for her to suffer under some asshole’s abuse and violent insecurities — as long as he has a dick, right?

Mars sighs. Because she is being so fucking dramatic. He is so tired of listening to his sister flap her fucking mouth. He just doesn’t really know what else he can say to appease his sister. Because everything he says — she always interprets as in defense of their parents. Because she’s fucking _crazy_ right now.

Nevertheless, he says, “They’re old as hell. They’re from a different country. And yes, they are old-fashioned and family-oriented —”

“Please don’t qualify their bullshit as ‘family-oriented,’” Missandei cuts in, in irritation. _“I’m_ family-oriented! I hang out with them every week even when they make me angry and miserable! You don’t think that’s fucking _family-oriented!”_

“Oh my God, simmer _down,_ sis,” Moss says.

“Oh my God, did you just tell me to calm down?” Missy asks, with an edge of dangerousness.

Moss is similarly fed up with her. He looks at her and wonders what she _even thinks_ she is going to do to him? He weighs twice as much as she does, and he carries a _fucking gun_ for work. He is not intimidated by her at all. He just doesn’t want her to cry in front of him.

Moss says, _“Yeah,_ I did. Because you need to simmer your ass down. Because you are being fucking _too much_ right now. Holy shit. Look, I love Grey. You _know_ I love him. I _know_ that what is happening is _bullshit._ But you need to _stop_ talking to us like we’re your fucking _enemy,_ you crazy _bitch.”_

She is rendered speechless after he says this.

 _Good._ He needs a fucking _break_ from all of the _noise._

Because Moss is also getting tired of all of _this shit._ He is getting tired of fighting with fucking _everyone._ He’s tired of fighting with his wife, with his parents, with the fucking kids over the dumbest shit like the color of their backpacks and whether or not they should eat their vegetables, with his brother because his brother is just fucking bossy, and with his sister, who keeps acting like she is _new_ and like she hasn’t already spent _years_ learning all about what their motherfucking parents are all about.

And for the record, she was _not_ at all _this pissed off_ and self-righteous and moralistic when their parents _flipped out_ about the dilution of their culture upon learning that Safi is Dothraki.

He says, “Where the fuck was this rage monster during my fucking engagement and wedding? Where the fuck were you when Safi was pregnant and getting bullshit half-breed comments from Mom? Back then, you were being real quiet and _complacent.”_

“Okay!” Missandei says loudly. “That’s a really good point!” she shouts. “I am _sorry!_ It just feels different when it’s happening to me!”

“What do you even want?” Mars asks her dully. “Are you angling for an apology? Do you want acceptance? Why are you then constantly screaming that their opinions don’t matter to you? Do you just want them to change after like, sixty-plus years of being the same? Do you want them to suddenly be super woke and to know all of the right terms and to suddenly talk about gender like they don’t think it’s binary, and everyone outside of the binary isn't a freak of nature? Oh, _okay.”_ His voice is dripping with sarcasm. “That’s reasonable.”

“You are playing right into their hand, by the way,” Moss says. “You are fucking miserable. You are making us miserable. I bet you are also making Grey fucking miserable, too. Good job, sis.”

 

 

  
Moss continues to hold some sort of clairvoyance when it comes to Grey, because Missandei _really is_ making Grey kind of miserable. She tells him about how her mother is trying to set her up with some guy whose parents are family friends of theirs. There must be a significant part of her that expects Grey to jump out of his seat and express disbelief and some sort of rage over this, because she is disappointed at his nonresponse.

He just looks at her steadily. He just says, “Oh, are you gonna call him and ask him out, then?”

She pointedly looks at him and says, “Do you think this is some sort of joke? Do you find this funny?”

In a deadpan, he says, “I am feeling like the answer should be no. So no. I don’t find this funny at all.”

She says, “Grey, what the hell?” because she is finding him so _annoying_ right now.

It’s cool. Because he feels the same way. He also finds her deeply annoying right now.

Even though Missandei once had a relationship get completely ruined by judgemental parents who refused to be open-minded, she was too young to have learned many lessons from it. She still has a hard time stopping the feelings of anger and resentment from creeping into other areas of her life, for one. Her obsessive brain has a hard time realizing that when return on investment of emotional labor is really low, it’s time to cut losses and just move on. She sometimes still gets really stuck on the notion that things ought to be fair and equal. She keeps thinking that she is in the right here, so why does she needs to eat shit just for the sake of getting along with her parents? She has already done this for decades. She is just fucking _over it._

Her parents’ current shittiness is all she wants to talk about right now— and after a certain point, Grey, who _has_ learned a number of lessons about letting go of the way he sometimes feels about his parents, just tells her to stop talking about it with him for a bit. He tells her he’d like a break from hearing it.

She is immediately offended — that he is muzzling her and censoring and making her voice quieter. She is immediately defensive and punchy about it.

He is shaking his head. Because he does not have the capacity for this shit anymore. He promised himself he’d stop working so hard to make _other people_ feel okay with his dicklessness. He’s trying to stand by that. So Missandei’s parents’ problem with his dicklessness is not even something he wants to register as a thing he even gives half a shit about.

He says to her, “Babe, can we just talk about something else for the rest of the night?”

She seriously says to him, “I’m sorry the way I feel is inconvenient for you.” She also adds, “You really don’t care that my mom is trying to set me up with an engineer?”

“No,” he says. “Because I assume you’re not going to go on a date with the guy, right? Because you’re with me, right?” He is still shaking his head. “So beyond that, I don’t know why I am supposed to care?”

She is looking at him like he is an alien right now. She is also shaking her head at him.

Hesitantly, he says, “Hey, if you are wanting me to blow up and threaten to slit my wrists over the thought of you being with someone else — um, I’m not going to do that. I’m not really about that.”

“I’m not a sixteen year old girl anymore, Grey,” she says witheringly, crossing her arms over her chest now.

“Right, I wasn’t trying to imply that —”

“Sure. That’s why I always feel like I’m _overreacting_ when I’m with you — when really, I’m just having normal human emotions.”

“Okie dokey,” he says sighing. He is getting up to clear his plate. “I’m heading out, babe. I’m tired. You’re tired. We have to work tomorrow. I don’t want to stay up all night hashing this out and then just be exhausted at work. So I’m gonna peace out.”

“Are you serious?” she asks. “You’re not sleeping over?”

“Miss, we’re not going to be sleeping. We’re going to be arguing.”

“This is so paternalistic —”

 _“Okay,_ well I’m not trying to be,” he interjects. “And see? It’s _happening._ We’re _arguing.”_

“Because you’re _leaving!”_ she insists.

“No,” he corrects. “Because _nothing_ I say or do _satisfies_ you.”

 

 

  
He seriously has to leave her apartment to get some space from this — to avoid being made to just feel terrible about all of this.

Before he leaves, he kisses her on the lips, and he tells her that he is touched by how much she cares — but she honestly doesn’t need to defend him so hard. He’s not fragile. He’s heard every terrible thing that can be said about his body already. The way people see him and feel about him doesn’t affect him as much as it used to. He has been dealing with shit like this for his entire life. But he gets that she is discovering all of this shit for the very first time — much like how white people go _nuts_ when they discover racism for the first time as adults — but he’s been through it all and he has done it all.

He’s getting frustrated as he holds onto her face, and he can’t tell how fair or unfair it is. He can also tell she resents him — for comparing her to white people who just discovered racism for the first time ever.

He kisses her again to try and soothe some of the truth away. He tells her he loves her so much, but he can also tell her the ending to this story. He tells her that it is hard enough for people to change when they _want to change._ It is impossible for people to change when they don’t want to. He points out that the emotional energy she is giving over to this hurts her more than it hurts her parents. He asks her why she even wants to her hurt her parents at all. Like, what good will come of this?

Then he leaves her place. He _feels_ her palpable but mostly silent disbelief as he leaves.

He actually ends up floating back to his folks’ house, on a kind of autopilot. If he speeds a little bit, he tells himself that he can make it in time for the end of Jeopardy. And if he is honest with himself, he kind of misses seeing his mom and dad everyday. He misses getting yelled at for breathing wrong. He misses his mom’s mediocre cooking. He misses being around people who wholly understand him and remember what he has gone through.

When he walks into the living room, his dad is sprawled out on the couch in his robe, shirtless. His dad says, “Oh, what are you doing here?”

Grey says, “I just miss you guys.” He has been realizing that one thing that he is kind of bad at is holding onto gratitude. He often forgets how lucky he is that his parents are who they are. Lately, he’s been thinking that he’d be a different person — a far more damaged person — if he had been raised by other people.

His dad is sitting up, chuckling. His dad is secretly pleased. His dad still says, “Christ, you are a needy child. You saw us just yesterday.”

Grey aptly says, “You are not going to make me feel awkward about this.” And then he says, “Where’s Mom?” because she is the parent that will actually appreciate what an emotional basketcase he is being right now.

“She’s reading in the bedroom.”

 

 

  
His mom is actually not reading in his parents’ bedroom. She is actually lying down on the bed with her iPad and FaceTiming with Azzie.

Grey is about to back right out of the room to give her some privacy, but she immediately calls out his name in happy surprise as she announces to his brother that he is here. She also immediately scoots over to make room for him on the bed.

Grey mutters, “Oh my God,” when he peeps the screen and sees that his brother is also in bed — with Tarra — and his brother is shirtless. Tarra appears to be wearing a tanktop, but she is showing too much skin and this entire setup is just making Grey feel really uncomfortable. He is reclined in bed next to his mommy, and she keeps freaking him out by getting too close to him so that he can see the iPad screen. The fucking thing is that he doesn’t even want to see the iPad screen because his brother and his lady have no fucking _boundaries._

Azzie can read Grey’s discomfort all the way from the Summer Isles. Azzie says, “Baby bro, have you ever considered that maybe _you’re_ the pervert? You’re the one that always reads something sexual in stuff that is just innocent. Tar and I were just chatting with Mom, you perv.”

“Why aren’t you wearing clothes?” Grey asks.

“Because it’s _hot,_ you perv! Why _else?_ And Mom has already seen me naked. Many times. She’s not attracted to me. Don’t worry.”

“Honey,” their mom says, her voice low and kind of weary.

Azzie quickly moves on. Azzie asks Grey how Missandei is. Grey tells his brother that Missandei is just great. Azzie then slyly smiles and reveals to Grey that their mom told him all about the holiday dinner with Missandei’s folks. It sounded like a real fun time.

Tarra tells Grey Mercury is in retrograde or some crazy shit like that — honestly, he is not listening because he cannot risk having real information get pushed out of his head because he opens his mind up to her crazy beans shit. But she tells him something about astrology, and she points out that that is the reason that he had a turbulent dinner with Missandei’s parents. She tells him it will correct itself soon.

He’s like, “Thanks, Tarra.”

 

 

  
After the call ends, their mom confesses to him. As Grey sits up and puts a respectable distance between himself and his mom, she tells him that Azzie sometimes creeps her out so much. She actually wishes Azzie would sometimes put on a shirt when he talks to her. She actually wishes that Azzie would talk _less_ about his sex life with her.

Grey says, “Ma, just tell him to put on his shirt when he talks to you. Tell him you don’t want to hear him say ‘balls deep’ ever again.”

His mom is great at focusing only on what she wants to focus on. This is why she says, “Why do you think he’s so attracted to her?”

“Tarra?” Grey asks quizzically. “Because she reminds him of you, obviously.”

His mom looks crestfallen. She says, _“Nudho.”_

“I’m joking, Mom,” he assures her. “She’s nothing like you. Like, she’s not smart.”

She tries to swat at him. She says, “Be kinder.”

Grey honestly has no answer at the ready. He doesn’t know why Azzie is so nuts about Tarra either, other than the fact that she is a kindred spirit to Azzie. Azzie probably has always felt like the black sheep of their family. In Tarra, he probably found his tribe. She likes the same stuff he likes — like chilling and relaxing and not getting worked up about things.

Grey says, “Oh, that’s probably why. Like, all that stuff I just said, is probably the reason why.”

He asks his mom how work is going. She tells him a really convoluted as shit tale about a property zoned for mixed used, with height limits. A developer wants to come in and revitalize the area, with a percentage of units dedicated to low-income housing. People in the neighborhood are losing their minds and calling it gentrification and displacement. His mom is reviewing contracts. And going to a lot of meetings where people are getting really upset and yelling at city reps. Just normal stuff.

She asks him how work is going for him. He tells her that he feels like he’s constantly behind all of the time because he’s beyond over capacity. One thing that gets shafted right away when he is overextended is that he becomes shit at mentoring and training other people. He has a new crop of interns that he keeps neglecting.

She asks him if mentoring others is something that is important to him. Maybe what he needs to do is give up this responsibility.

He tells her that he thinks it is — that it is important to him.

She says, “Then you have to delegate or give up some of your other work. You can’t do it all, and it’s not really impressive when you try to do it all. You just look like a control freak who cannot let go, one who is not generous in knowledge-sharing.”

He likes how unimpressed with him she is sometimes. It is a great ego boost.

At a certain point in their conversation, Grey warns his mom that he’s about to get creepy with her — and before she can respond and ask him clarifying questions, he blurts out to her that it’s about sex.

Which actually makes her relax in relief. She says, “Oh! That’s not creepy!” It’s not creepy when Grey talks about sex, because it’s a rarity. It is only creepy when her older son does, because it is excessive.

And then her face gets tense. She says, “Unless you did something bad?”

“No!” he says. “Mom! What bad thing could I have done?”

She plainly answers with, “Rape.”

He is wincing. He is saying, _“Mom.”_ He sometime forgets that she works a lot with incarcerated youth, so horrific sex crimes come up with regularity in her line of work. He says, “You’re kind of making me wish I went to Dad about this right now.”

And because she sometimes feels left out and competitive over how close Grey and his father are, she says, “No! Don’t talk to him about this. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He will only tell you medical, health stuff. I’m more emotionally intelligent than he is. Talk to _me._ So — you did not rape anyone. So what is your sex problem?”

Very reluctantly, he tells his mommy about his bedroom issues. Because that just seems like something normal and not at all weird, for a thirty-one-year-old man to discuss with his mother. He tells his mom that he and Missandei still have not had sex yet because he’s so nervous about letting Missandei see him naked. And he’s like, nervous about performance. Missandei recently tried to sit on him — in that area — and he completely freaked out and started cowering. So that was really like — manly and sexy. He tells his mom that he’s worried that the sex will be bad and Missandei will slowly stop loving him. There’s a really irrational part of him that thinks that if they just don’t have sex together, then she will keep loving him. So, his sex issues are just normal stuff like that.

In response to _all of this,_ his mom thoughtfully goes, “Hmm.” And then she wonders out loud — how she ended up with one son who sometimes gets really uncomfortable when he gets touched by his own mother and a son who would show her an image of his butt or even his penis, if he has a pimple somewhere that he is even mildly concerned about. She wonders out loud if Grey’s accident made him so body conscious.

He is staring at her with his eyes bugged out. He says, “Mom. My accident _definitely_ made me so body conscious, are you kidding me?”

“I dunno,” she says. “Maybe you would’ve turned out like this anyway. Your dad was also pretty nervous the first time he and I had sex. He was actually really insultingly scared that I was lying to him about whether or not my body was diseased. I told him my body was not diseased. He did not believe me because he was reading a lot of medical texts, and he was just so paranoid and really keen on eventually leaving the Summer Isles. He didn’t want a woman holding him down. So he was really mean to me sometimes. He kept telling me I was going to give him a sex infection or get pregnant on purpose so that I could trap him in the Isles and make him support a child he didn’t want, for the rest of his miserable life. I tried to leave him about fifty times because he was such a jerk.” His mom pauses. And not at all for the first time in life, she says, “Oh my God, you are _just_ like your father. Huh.” She is scanning her eyes around the bedroom, trying to grasp onto an insight.

Grey says, _“Mom,”_ trying to get her to spit out her grand lesson.

“Just do it, honey. Just have sex with her. Just close your eyes. And do it. If it lessens the pressure, just have her be in charge. You just lie there and let her do all the work. I think you’ll be fine. The first time won’t be great. But I’m sure you’ll be better the second and third times.”

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters. “I think I talked to the wrong parent here.”

His mom ignores him. She’s grinning. She says, “You know what’s funny? I actually got pregnant with Azzie soon after your dad and I started having sex together. He was like, ahhh, you bitch, you ruined my life! And I was like, uh, excuse me? And then he wouldn’t let me get an abortion, so we had your brother.”

“Mom —”

“And then four years later, you came along. My littlest baby.”

“Mom —”

 _“Nudho,_ you are so literal-minded, just like your father. I’m trying to tell you. I was unmarried, pregnant, and younger than you are now. Your grandfather disowned me. There was a civil war going on, and people were dying. And I gave up everything to escape that place, following and putting my trust in a man that I wasn’t _at all_ sure was going to be a good father to my children. I felt very vulnerable. And _that_ is _hard,_ sweetie. In contrast, you have a girl who adores you. And money. And a nice place to live. You have parents who would do just about anything for you. I’ve seen you naked — many times. You look perfectly fine. So just take off your clothes and _have sex with her._ It’s not hard, honey. Just make sure she orgasms. Or try. Sometimes it’s hard. Actually, don’t put that pressure on yourself, baby. She won’t die if she doesn’t have an orgasm the first time. And question! When is sex sex for you? What is the demarcation? Is it some sort of penetration? I hope not, Nudho. That’s so — that’s unhealthy, honey.”

“Mom,” he says hopelessly — with a lot of bleakness. “Sex obviously becomes real legit when there is some sort of genital contact.”

She’s nodding. “Oh, okay! That makes sense!” And then after a really short pause, she says, “I’m a really good mom even though I worked too much and was not around enough to take care of you. I know this because of the conversation we just had.” She leans forward to cup his cheek in her hand. She says, “You are _so cute._ You were such a cute baby. You were such a cute child. You are still _so cute.”_

He can sense that she is actually a little insecure about this. This is why he touches her hand. This is why he says, “You are a _really_ good mom.”

 

 

 


	55. Missy is over Grey's bullshit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey kind of tries to have a heart to heart with his bestie, and it went . . . okay? Missy is currently not DTF because the love of her life is aggravating her. And then they have a nice romantic night out!

 

 

  
After their impromptu pick-up game, Drogo tells them all he feels real old. He grumbles that his body is bigger and slower these days. Xhondo, who was huffing and puffing real hard during the game, rolls his eyes at Drogo. Xhondo holds onto his belly with both of his hands as he tells Drogo to just shut the fuck up.

As the guys all start dispersing, Drogo checks his watch and notes that he still has a couple hours to kill before he can go back home. Dany is doing something with professional friends at the house. And he hates her work friends because they are rich, liberal white people like his wife, and her friends refuse to see color so they just respond with uncomfortable silence whenever he jokingly tells them his observations about the stuff white people do and like. They never laugh. They keep insisting on their uniqueness and their individuality by saying shit like, “But I like crusts on my sandwiches! The crust is the best part!”

Her friends are actually super nice. So he kind of feels like an ass for disliking them so much. They just keep introducing him to other people as, “This is Drogo! He’s Dany’s husband. He’s _really funny!”_ Drogo can’t help but be like, what the fuck, if these people think he’s hilarious, why do they never laugh at his jokes? He is convinced that it is some white guilt bullshit that makes them say he’s funny when they actually don’t get _any_ of his jokes.

“Yeah,” Qotho says in a deadpan as he wipes sweat off his face with a towel. “That sounds like some real hardship you got there, D.”

Drogo throws his sweat-soaked shirt into Qotho’s face, as Qotho starts cracking up over Drogo’s extreme sensitivity over his non-problems in life. To the rest of them, Drogo says, “Y’all feel like eating something?”

“With you?” Tal asks. “Nah.” And then he also cracks up. “For real though, I have to go get ready for work.”

Xhondo has plans with his lady’s family. Balaq has to do errands before the weekend is over. Jalabhar gives no reason. He just starts waving bye to them as he walks to his car. Drogo is like, oh okay. Good talk. See you?

Islanders are fucking terrible at saying hello and goodbye. It is a weird, sometimes annoying cultural quirk of theirs. Dothraki will build entire conversations around a hello or a goodbye. Friendships are often forged over a casual greeting from across the room.

“Wanna grab a bite?” Drogo asks Grey, who is the only one left.

 

 

  
Grey likes to load up on gluten when Missandei isn’t around, so he suggests a noodle place because he loves springy wheat noodles and gluten-free substitutes made of corn and rice are just not the same.

Grey and Drogo are both still sweaty and sticky as they sit side by side at a counter, quietly waiting for their food.

Hanging out — just the two of them — continues to be awkward _as shit._ Drogo still loves how removed he feels from his bestest friend in the world. Grey still loves how fucking loaded every innocuous statement feels. They are both worrying that this is how it’s just going to be for the rest of their lives.

Drogo doesn’t feel like he can ask about Missandei, so he asks about Grey’s job. Grey doesn’t even have one single meaningful update on his job. It’s still about the same as it always is. There’s always some fire burning and there’s always a deadline that is a moving target. He still can’t talk about it much because of NDAs. Grey then skips quickly through other parts of his life. Parents are the same. Brother is the same. Friends are all the same. Missandei is the same. Everything is just fine.

Drogo has to repeat this — his own version of it — because he would feel like a real dipshit if he complained at length about work or Dany’s brother or Dany’s friends after Grey said that everything is just fine.

They eat entirely way too fast. They are ravenous, so their bowls are empty after fifteen minutes. And, after grabbing the entire check, Drogo finds that dinner took up less than half an hour in total. Awesome.

With a fair bit of uncertainty, they pull their jackets back on and start walking once outside the restaurant. Drogo is surprised that Grey is sticking around, that Grey isn’t ducking into his car to carry on with the rest of his day either.

Over the past few months, Drogo has examined his relationship with this person to death, and he has come to the conclusion that their friendship consists mostly of shared interest in physical activities, drinking, and also Drogo giving a lot of unsolicited advice. Over the past year, he has felt fucking stupid and daft, because it took him so long to understand that he was big-brothering someone who already had a big brother, someone who didn’t want to be big-brothered.

So this is why Drogo tries to flip the script. He says, “Um, so Dany and I had a really dumb, but really stressful fight the other day.” He feels like he is blurting this out kind of randomly.

“Oh?” Grey says, staring ahead at the row of eclectic shops. “About what?”

“She was trying to explain something fucking convoluted and boring to me about work, and when I didn’t understand it right away, she called me stupid. And that triggered something in me, so I blew up at her. And she hated that, so she started really throwing down. And then we like — just started screaming out all of this shit we hate about each other.”

Grey frowns. He says, “Your dad used to call you dumb.”

“That’s a bit on the nose,” Drogo says, smiling. “But yeah, he _did_ like to say I was just like him, so I wasn’t going to amount to anything.”

“Did you guys talk it out?” Grey asks politely. “You and Dany, I mean. After the fight?”

Drogo winces. “Ah, not really. We just said sorry to each other, and then we had sex.”

“That works, too, I guess.” Grey shrugs. “I just resort to talking — just a fuckton of conversations about feelings — because I don’t have anything else — I don’t have sex.”

Drogo studiously avoids going right to the sex part of the discussion because it seems like he just should. Instead, he says what _he thinks_ is the right thing. He says, “I think talking through it is healthy. Dany and I are sometimes pretty bad at talking to each other.”

They then casually and carefully talk about their differences in this respect. Grey says he’s exhaustive when it comes to analyzing how he feels and what he thinks sometimes, because his parents made him go to a therapist after the accident. And his parents are both pretty like, open — so they modeled that for him. Grey notes that Drogo’s family loves to scream loudly and cry hard when things get a little tough, so that’s probably where he gets his emotional volatility from.

Drogo says, “Probably.”

Grey shrugs.

And then to the both of them, it just feels like this conversation is just dying a slow and torturous death — what the fuck? Are they best friends or are they _best friends?_

“It’s chilly, huh?” Drogo offers.

“Yeah, it’s been kind of wet and cold,” Grey says.

“I bet it was really nice to get a break from winter — by visiting the Isles?”

“Oh, for sure,” Grey says. “It was awesome.”

They are walking toward the entrance to an urban park, to a running trail. It’s somewhere that they can lose an hour, maybe even two hours if they pause at bridges to look at water and shit.

When faced with the prospect of looking at fish with Drogo for hours, having more of these terrible conversations, Grey starts to just back away. He literally slows his steps before he starts nudging himself backwards a little bit. He says, “Ahh, D. I don’t think I have the time to do the trail. Unless you wanna run it?”

And Drogo literally sees his best friend in the entire world backing away from him because he’s so terrified of spending time among trees with Drogo. Drogo is just in disbelief.

He is also just deeply hurt. He’s been asshurt over this shit for a while now, actually.

This is why Drogo says, “Hey, if you fucking hate me and don’t want to spend time with me, just straight up tell me, okay? You don’t have to ghost me _right in front of my face.”_ And then Drogo winces. Because it is just _great,_ how _dramatic_ he sounds right now.

Grey’s face drops into a frown.

And then Grey, who is a tad less self-conscious about how dramatic he sounds, starts unleashing just a shit load of _stuff._ He refuses to reassure Drogo and tell the guy that he wants to spend time with the guy — obviously he does and he is _trying,_ otherwise why the fuck did he even eat second lunch with the guy even though _no one else_ wanted to?

Grey tells Drogo that he has been really preoccupied and stressed out. He and Azzie had a really shitty fight while he was in the Summer Isles. Azzie asked him what his plans are for the next year or so. He started telling Azzie about his professional goals — because they are legit his plans for the next year. But Azzie was disgusted by Grey’s constant focus on achievement because that’s their dad’s bullshit. So Azzie started getting on Grey’s ass about how there is more to life than just making money. Grey tells Drogo he doesn’t understand why being like their dad is so bad. And fucking _obviously_ there is more to life than money. It was actually infuriating, that his brother boiled down his job to money.

In response to this, Drogo says, “Your brother is a dipshit.”

Which isn’t all that reassuring or comforting, but Grey presses forward anyway. Grey tells Drogo that his dad is still constantly on his ass about everything — but that’s normal, and its white noise at this point. Grey also tells Drogo that Missandei’s parents like — _really_ don’t like him. Like, he’s not even exaggerating or making this up on his head to feed his anxiety. They straight up don’t like him because he’s not at all what they want for their daughter.

“What does that even mean?” Drogo asks.

“I think they hate that I’m not manly or normal enough? And so the penis thing is just icing on that cake.”

“Don’t they know that Missy likes you because you’re not like other guys?”

Grey shrugs. “Is that why she likes me? I don’t even know sometimes.”

“Don’t say that.” Drogo is frowning. “You’re awesome.”

This also isn’t really helping him feel better, but for the sake of their stupid friendship — and changing the nature of it — Grey presses on. He says, “Sometimes I think everyone is right about me. I _am_ averse and resistant to change. I am a scared bitch. I am a bit of a coward with my feelings. Sometimes I wish that — instead of being so great at analyzing my feelings and my thoughts and my beliefs out loud — I was just good at screaming and crying when I get upset and angry, or sad — like you.”

“Okay, I don’t cry,” Drogo immediately corrects. And it is because he is panicking — because his brain is blank and he doesn’t know what thing to say that isn’t pathetically trite and cliched and fucking stupid — because Dany might be right. He might be emotionally stunted and emotionally stupid.

“There’s no shame in crying,” Grey says.

“I know there’s not!” Drogo declares. “I just don’t cry!”

“Okay!” Grey shouts, raising his voice, too. “I hear you!”

There’s just generally a really high-pitched, elongated beep sound in Drogo’s head and a lot of oh shits. Drogo just keeps going oh shit oh shit oh shit as Grey spills out his guts in front of a tree. Drogo wants to fucking kick his own fucking ass, because he’s so fucking slow and so fucking moronic about this stuff. None of the old shit applies anymore — because of their one pivotal fight. He can’t push bravado and confidence at Grey and make some sort of sex joke. He can’t fucking give this guy fucking pointers on how to feel more comfortable in his own skin — through sex. He _definitely_ cannot give this guy pointers on building intimacy and trust with other people — because what even the fuck? Drogo is entirely out of his depth here.

“You don’t have to say anything, man,” Grey says. “I know this isn’t your area of expertise.”

“Fuck you!” Drogo snaps. “Just give me a second to _think.”_ And then after a second or two ticks by, Drogo just gives up and says, “Dammit, I have nothing. I’m sorry. I’m the fucking worst.”

“It’s okay. I can tell you are trying.”

 

 

  
Missy finds that when she is cranky, she does not want sex — or affection really. Things have been really tense with Grey because he’s mean and withholding, and she is a normal person who is nice and giving. So that is kind of an obstacle in their relationship.

She rolls her eyes, to signal to her therapist that this is totally a joke and she knows that things aren’t so black and white. She knows that he’s just like, a different person with a different outlook on life and different priorities. She also understands that she will _never_ understand what he has gone through and the psychological effects of it. She actually _does_ feel kind of bad that her patience with his reticence is wearing thin. Maybe she should be more patient. He has been through so much.

She tells Olenna that he is really smart. He has given himself a break from the pressures of sex because he has pissed her off so bad that she doesn’t want it from him anymore. She has learned that her sex drive just plummets when she feels underappreciated and unheard. She tells Olenna this, and it is still striking to her, that all of these things that are probably old hat to most adults, but they are so new and novel to her because she is a fetus when it comes to romantic relationships and sex.

She says, “He’s just a real callous asshole sometimes. What am I supposed to do with that? Just put up with it?” The question is rhetorical.

But Olenna answers anyway. She says, “No, Missandei. You don’t just put up with it.”

And then, probably more accurately pinpointing the problem, Missandei says, “I didn’t realize that my parents could poison my relationship like this. Before him, I didn’t realize that this is something that people would fight about in relationships.”

 

 

  
They are still a little tense with each other when the concert creeps around. It’s kind of bad timing, because he could use continuing space from her anxious brain because her anxiety riles him up — in a bad way. He gets anxious and starts like, getting low self-esteem because of it.

It is bad timing because none of their old jokes land well. Like, when he insults her taste in music, she takes it _personally,_ and dinner is just the fucking worse — with her trying not to cry at the table and him refusing to apologize because she is being overly sensitive and he didn’t really do anything wrong.

It is a relief to get to the venue. Because it is so loud and so it’s near-impossible to talk to each other. And it is dark, so she can tear up all she wants to without feeling self-conscious about it.

And he pretty much abandons her without saying a word to go the toilets. It’s too loud so he thinks it’s pointless to say anything to her. She does not agree with this. He doesn’t even signal to her that he is leaving. She pretty much stands around alone like a real dork as she is like, okay, see you later?

When a man tries to hit on her by offering to buy her a drink, she is so emotional that she looks brittle and like she is on the cusp of just losing it. Over the DJ, he shouts, “Hey! Are you _okay!”_

She can’t tell if this is a line or if this is an honest inquiry. She chooses to think it’s the latter. She says, “I’m fine!” And then — in a freak bit of random honesty, she says, “My boyfriend and I are fighting!”

It was actually sort of a line. The guy quickly absconds when she isn’t looking. He takes his drink and he disappears because he just wanted to buy a beautiful woman by herself a drink. He did not want to listen to the problems she is having with her boyfriend.

When Missy turns around and finds that she’s alone again, she shakes her head in disbelief. Because men are _terrible._ She makes eye contact with the female bartender, who is too busy to like, really pay attention to her in solidarity. Missy just miserably waits. And then when it’s her turn, she points bottles of alcohol. She tells the bartender to make her whatever is easy and whatever is strong.

 

 

  
When she finds him again, she is holding two drinks in her hands, and he is talking to a gorgeous young woman in a white t-shirt. Because _of course he is._ He starts to reach for one of the glasses — and honestly, she got both of these for herself, so she wouldn’t have to wait in line again. She figured that he’d want beer. Because of course he’d want to fuck up his mouth because they currently just _hate each other_ right now.

She lets him take her second drink without protest anyway.

He tries to introduce the two of them. It is hard to hear him over the music. He tells her that the young woman — Tish — is actually one of his interns. He tells Missandei that Tish is in grad school for information management. He tells Tish that Missandei is his partner.

And then in wonderment, he laughingly observes to Tish that it’s so crazy they are running into each other on the weekend. Because what does someone young and hip even have in common with a boring old person like him?

“You’re not boring!” Tish shouts, looking up and down at his clothes — but really, it’s a cover for looking at his body. “I don’t think you’re boring at all!”

Tish so clearly has a crush on him. Or she idolizes him because he is good at his job, and he is a slightly older man in a position of power. Whatever the specific thing is, it is pretty obvious that Missandei is interrupting _something._ And there is _no way_ Grey is oblivious. Because he is great at picking up on these things, on account of spending a lot of his young adulthood trying to manage women’s interest in him so that he didn’t scar them for life by taking off his pants in front of them.

So Missy gives them space. Because what else is she going to do? Is she going to have to pee all over him to claim him as hers? He doesn’t like that — she knows that now. He does not like jealousy because it’s so emotional and so human and so insecure. And she is completely bored by the technical work shit that the two of them are talking about — in the middle of the opener, what the fuck?

So she leaves them. She grabs another exorbitant drink before she gently nudges her way to the front, toward the stage. She gets as close as she dares, before she feels super self-conscious about cutting in line in front of people and blocking the view of other women with her hair.

She is doing pretty okay out there — until a drunk woman spontaneously trips in the midst of her dancing and careens right into Missandei. Drinks fly. Glasses get dropped. Shards of shrapnel fly out, clipping shoes. Missandei starts bending down to clean it up, but a staffmember-slash-bouncer gets there real fast and tells her not to touch the broken glass — like she is dumb. And it is good that he told her that, because she really is _dumb._ She just looks dumbfounded as he shines a flashlight at her feet. He tells her to back up a little bit.

The drunk woman is already over this. She is already dancing again. Missandei watches this, and she thinks, _goals._ She wonders how she can be similarly footloose and fancy-free.

 

 

 

 


	56. Missy and Grey are jerks to each other

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy drinks a lot because she has a hard time managing her emotions. Grey drinks a lot for the same reason. They meet Moss and his partner for late night munchies. Grey gets pissy because Moss is doing his job and preventing people from dying needlessly. Then this jerk takes the love of his life back to his apartment, where she yells at him for giving her kombucha. These two are well-matched!

 

 

  
He spends half an hour searching for her in a panic, shoving his way through crowds and almost getting punched a few times for it. He is afraid that she is hurt. He is afraid that she is having an anxiety attack, and he just fucking abandoned her. He is afraid some fucking asshole threw beer in her face and she is just dying from gluten-poisoning right now.

She is actually kind of hammered by the time he finds her again, right in the thick middle of it all.

He grabs her by the wrist, yanking her to him. She screeches in fear because it is dark, she isn’t expecting it, and getting suddenly grabbed is _terrifying._ It looks a certain way — like, it looks assault-y enough that he feels a heavy hand on his shoulder and then he is looking up into the face of a really, really big guy.

It’s too loud for them to talk for real, but Grey still gestures. He is gesturing to her, shouting just terrible shit like, “She’s my — we’re — she’s with me! She’s mine!” He shakes his head at himself. Quietly, he just sarcastically mutters to himself, “I have ownership over her.”

The other dude isn’t buying it — that they are together. Because Missandei is trying to yank her arm from his grasp. And honestly, Grey is kind of touched and impressed, that this random stranger is just being a good guy and being protective of her even though he doesn’t know her. Like, Grey _could_ be a predator. This guy doesn’t know!

Grey tries to kick her in the shin with his foot so that she can like — _help him out here._ He screams, _“Missandei!”_

She _finally_ recognizes him. Relief floods him as she does a doubletake, stops struggling against his grasp, and then reaches out to softly press her hand to his chest. She makes eye contact with the big guy and nods vigorously. He nods back and offers her a high-five, before he goes back to his date. His date is also really, really drunk.

Oh shit. They are buds. She made a new friend. With a dude. This is really out of character for her.

 

 

  
His ears are ringing after the concert, and Tish finds him outside of the ladies’ restroom to tell him that she’s going to an after party. He stares at her and is like, “Oh, cool!” about it. He ignores the hint. The thing about getting older is that he just doesn’t fuck around with subtext anymore.

“Do you want to come?” she boldly asks him.

He’s like, oh shit. She apparently doesn’t mess around either. That is actually cool. He admires how forthright she is, actually.

And because he doesn’t think he should need to use Missandei as a reason for why he isn’t interested in an after party with twenty-somethings and why he thinks it’s semi-inappropriate for her to ask him — her boss’ boss — to hang out socially with her — he straight up says, “No. I’m not interested. You have fun though. See you at work tomorrow.”

She takes the straightforward rejection in stride. She smiles at him — her face shiny from sweat. She does not touch him or make a move to touch him — which he really appreciates. She just says, “Okay. It was really, _really_ nice running into you tonight. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

“Later.”

After Tish leaves, he catches Missandei’s watchful stare, a short distance away. He kind of does a double-take because he does not know how this drunk woman was stealthy enough to catch him unaware. He walks over and reaches out to touch her hand. He says, “Ready to go home?”

She says, “Yeah sure. Are you done flirting with your intern, then?”

He drops her hand right at that.

She says, “Relax. It was a joke. I don’t actually care. Just like you don’t care if I go on a date with an engineer.”

He actually mutters, “Oh my God, you are being psychotic.”

Her voice gets a little bit louder, as she kind of shouts in his face. She says, “Why aren’t you _jealous!_ I am a _beautiful woman!_ Other men are interested in me, too! Are you a freak of nature?”

He shakes his head in exasperation. He then turns around and just starts walking out of the venue, pushing his way through siphoning bodies. He immediately regrets this. He immediately worries that he is a fucking asshole, and he just left her to get trampled to death by this really slow stampede of sleepy thirty-somethings like him.

She is actually right behind him. He feels relief when he feels her grabbing onto the back of his shirt, so that she doesn’t lose him in the crowd. He reaches backwards to try and paw for her hand.

Then, he’s trying to help guide her drunk ass down the street with his palms on her elbows, but she is not really having any of it. She keeps being a brat and insisting that he doesn’t care if she falls in love with someone else, so why does he even want to hold onto her right now? He keeps stopping himself from strangling her — as he simultaneously worries she’s going to twist her ankle and fall down. She keeps yanking her limbs out of his hands and throwing herself off balance with the momentum. She keeps almost tripping and face-planting herself into a brick wall or asphalt.

He’s also been drinking. So he can’t drive the home just yet. He just hovers around her like she is made of glass and just anxiously follows her as she walks a few blocks and then aimlessly propels her body into a diner. He says, “What the fuck? _Missandei!”_ as he follows her into the restaurant.

The bright lights nearly blind him. He blinks and then tries to reach out for her, catching only air under his palm

He opens his eyes to peek when he hears a feminine voice say, “Oh, shit. Your sister is wasted.”

Grey realizes that she has texted her brother, who is on duty. He realizes that they are here to meet her brother.

 

 

  
After she sits down and gets a menu of her own, Missandei orders an entire plate of bacon and specifically and repeatedly asks for this stuff to not be cooked in butter. The server tells them that the cook really doesn’t cook bacon in butter? But Missandei still insists that they are like, super careful _please._ She tells the server she has an autoimmune disease, not an allergy. Like, this is serious. Like, this is life and death.

The server is so over this shit. Their server is pretty over drunk wannabes and their millions of anal retentive requests.

After the server leaves, Missandei starts gulping down her glass of water as her brother, in uniform, chuckles slowly.

Karen, Moss’ partner, completely has the wrong idea of Missandei. She really knows Missandei only from Moss’ stories and the occasional cookout at Moss’ house. Moss tends to describe his little sister as a helpless idiot out there in the big bad world. So, coupled with the way Missandei looks, Karen has assumed that Missandei is a bit of a princess.

Missandei does a pretty good job of dispelling this misconception — by saying, “Ugh, this water is not filtered! _Gross._ This is like, tap water! _Moss!_ Why am I drinking _tap water!_ And why isn’t there more ice in this!”

 _“Relax,”_ he says to his little sister, as he swivels his head around to catch the server’s attention again. “What do you want instead? Do you want a soda? Do you want Perrier? Do you want juice? Do you want coffee? Tea? What do you fucking _want?”_

“I want kombucha,” she says solemnly.

“Sorry, baby girl,” he says — with a crazy amount of patience. “They don’t have that here. How about a Sprite?”

“I don’t want a Sprite!” she says adamantly. “I want kombucha. And I also want sex.”

Moss starts coughing violently — because he laughed around a sip of his coffee and sucked it down the wrong hole. Karen has to reach around and start beating the crap out of her partner’s back to help him get it all out.

Grey is pretty over how worried she has made him all night. He is pretty over how drunk she is and how she likes to try to dive right into traffic when she is drunk. He is over how great she is at embarrassing him in front of her family members.

All night, he’s been screaming at himself that he is _not this guy._ He’s not the guy that chases after a woman constantly, asking her if she is okay without him. He’s not the guy that feels just completely sick with guilt because he had like, _one conversation_ with another woman who is attractive. He’s not the guy that just aches with worry whenever she is out of his sight.

So he is not cheerfully playing along when Moss gives him an amused look and a head tilt.

Grey is serious and severe as he says, “What? You want me to have sex with your sister like, right here? Right now? On this table?”

Karen says, “Whoa, y’all have a weird dynamic.”

 

 

  
After second dinner, Moss doesn’t let Grey drive Missandei home without first blowing into a breathalyzer. Grey is kind of insulted and is like, _“Really?”_

Moss says, “Yeah, _really._ It’s the law, man.”

The first time Grey blows, he’s actually a touch over the legal limit. Just a fraction over.

So Moss says nope. Moss says, “You can’t drive my baby sister anywhere right now, man.”

Grey crankily says, “Fine. I’ll just fucking leave her here with you then. So you can do a better job of _protecting her.”_

The words are baiting and condescending — but Moss is not falling for it. Moss just says, “You can’t do that. I’m working. I can’t babysit a drunk woman as I’m working. You gotta take her. After you get yourself under the legal limit.” Moss suggests Grey take a quick run around the block, maybe.

“That’s not how it works,” Grey says crossly. “Exercise doesn’t speed up the rate of alcohol metabolism. It’s science and shit, man.”

So Moss just makes Grey wait another five minutes. In those five minutes, Moss is mocking and being just like — the most annoying person. Moss tells Grey that Moss doesn’t think they have ever disagreed — no less actually fought with each other before. This is like, their first-ever fight. It is kind of special and should be commemorated. Moss takes out his phone and suggests that they take a selfie together, maybe send it to Azzie with a caption about how Grey is just reckless with other people’s lives.

Grey wants to punch Mossador in the fucking face. So badly.

Instead of doing that, he just stops talking to Moss. Like, in a for real way. Like, in a way that makes Moss start feeling bad — right before he has to leave to go back to work.

He makes Grey blow again — and it’s under the legal limit. He still says, “I know you’re legal now, but it would actually mean a lot to me if you just wait a _little bit_ longer, before you take her home. Please.”

 

 

  
Grey’s having a really shitty night. He also got a little carried away with the booze at the concert because he’s just tired — and he’s acting out. Just like she is acting out a little bit. It’s because he actually misses being a godless heathen who doesn’t believe in marriage because he would rather she suffer for the rest of her life as a single woman rather than let her take his last name and give over half of his money to her. He finds that being someone that her parents low-key disapproved of was a lot better than being someone that her parents just don’t acknowledge at all. He used to feel a little bit bad about the difference in their belief systems. Now he just feels bad about himself. Period.

It is a familiar feeling. And it just sucks because he thought he was past this. He finds that being with Missandei and opening himself up to being vulnerable again just so he can fully love her is just the fucking pits sometimes. It’s fucking bullshit sometimes, because all of the old pains just keep coming up. And it’s like no time has passed at all. It is still painful to contend with the fact that some people don’t feel any empathy for him at all. Some people would just rather he not taint them and their daughter.

And it’s not that he doesn’t feel jealousy. And it’s not like he doesn’t constantly worry that she’s going to fall in love with someone else.

It’s just that he knows he can’t really do _anything_ to stop this from happening, if it’s going to happen. He knows this from experience.

“Wanna have car sex?” she asks him, as she gazes out the fogged up window of the unmoving car. It is rhetorical because she already knows the answer to this question.

He says, “No thanks.”

“Are we ever gonna have sex? Ever?”

He is just so pissed that she is doing this right now. Just so _pissed._ This is why he says, “Right now, it does not look likely.”

 

 

  
She is drunk — and also angry. Her anger gives her the illusion of being kind of sober. She is pissed for all of the obvious reasons — he is a fucking jerk. And she will probably never ever get laid — ever. She really likes how he is digging his own self-righteous grave. When this relationship fucking dies because he sabotages it to death, he can tell everyone in his life that it’s because she didn’t fully accept him and his body and his trauma, when the truth is that he just keeps refusing to let her in and accept that things can’t be perfect. He would rather be right and alone than give even a fucking inch.

He ends up driving them to his apartment — which is great because she is fucking drunk and, now, also fucking stranded because it’s not like she can fucking bus it the fuck home at this time of night.

Almost as if plucking the thought from her head, he reminds her, “You left your car at my apartment. You need that thing to go home tomorrow. When you are sober.”

She almost tells him to shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up with his unrelentingly pragmatism and rightness. Sometimes people just want to _feel_ the way they irrationally _feel._

She refuses to cry some more over this shit. So her eyes are dry as she stomps her way into his apartment. She kicks her heels off a little too hard. One kind of flies and hits his couch.

“Man, can you just _not?”_ he asks.

She opts not to respond to this bullshit. She just starts pulling off her bootie socks and stuffs them in her warm and damp boot.

 

 

  
It’s when he hands her a fizzy glass of his kombucha because he remembers that she wants it, that she goes completely insane.

She has a bit of a meltdown over it. She refuses to take the glass and she starts just screaming at him. She tells him to stop acting like he is such a nice guy — like he is so noble and self-sacrificing. She tells him that she’s really fucking tired of being the hot mess in their relationship. She’s tired of him always having all of the fucking answers and always teaching her shit — like how to be a better person. She is fucking tired of being passed around like she’s a fucking helpless moron — from her dad’s hands to her older brothers' hands to _his fucking hands._ She tells him that she has done _everything_ he has asked of her. She has jumped through all of his fucking hoops.

He is like, “Uh, come again?”

She starts listing things off her fingers. She tells him that she speaks with more directness now. She is more transparent about her wants now. She goes to him with her questions about his body instead of to everyone else now. She doesn’t let herself go _nuts_ when he talks to another woman. She is fucking _friends_ with his ex now. She has even made herself feel _sexual attraction_  for him — which is like — fucking _amazing._ She is like, sexually open and has the vocabulary of a fucking porn star now. It is actually fucking amazing that every fucking bullshit obstacle he threw up — she has overcome.

And he _still_ won’t have sex with her. Because he is _never_ going to have sex with her, is he? He is just going to keep coming up with fucking reasons for more delays, _isn’t he?_

“Because the entire time I have been busting _my ass_ working _so hard_ on myself, what have you been _doing?_ Have you even been working through your fucking mental shit about your body _at all?”_ She is screaming, “Why am _I_ doing all of the fucking _work_ here!”

 

 

  
Yeah. He is still incredibly pissed off at her. If anything — his anger has only grown during her entire diatribe on how _he doesn’t fucking try._ He thinks it’s really amazing that this person who is the closest person to him in the entire fucking world is telling him that she does not see any of his efforts. He thinks that he must be just really shitty at trying hard because apparently he is not trying hard enough. Apparently the raw and terrifying ways he has to grapple with his history and his feelings don’t even fucking _matter_ to her. Apparently all the times his heart threatened to choke him out — every time he did something difficult — _don’t even matter._

So he says, “You want to have sex? Fine. Let’s have sex. Take off your clothes.”

She pauses. She looks like she’s trying to figure out of this is a fucking trick or a joke.

He says, “This is not a trick. This is not a joke. I am serious.” As he pulls off his shirt, he bitterly says, “You are right. This relationship is uneven. You have been doing a lot. I have not been doing enough. So I am rectifying that.”

 

 

  
She thinks he’s being an asshole and just doing this and saying these things to be a real asshole to her. He understands why she thinks this. Like, all of the beats feel like he’s being an asshole.

It’s because _he is being an asshole._ He is pretty much banking on the fact that she is going to back the fuck away when it gets legit. He pretty much assumes that she won’t call his bluff on this — because she doesn’t even know what she wants. She just _thinks_ she knows what she wants. He thinks that nothing is ever as easy as what she makes them out to be. Her love can’t fucking heal him. And her love has to be at least a little bit conditional.  
  
So he advances on her — slowly — to give her a lot of time to back out.

She just stares at him. And she starts backing up a little bit, unconsciously. It has the appearance of fear — and that makes him feel really, really shitty inside. He tells himself it is already starting. She is already scared of him.

His hand is tingly — numb — as he moves it in between her thighs, to touch the bare skin of her legs. He cuts eye contact because this just feels raw, and it also feels sad. He _has_ thought a fair bit about their first time — and he thought that he’d open it up by telling her about just how much he loves her — because he just loves her _so much._ He feels like it’s not appropriate to tell her he loves her right now.

Her inner leg is warm. And soft. This area of her body is very nice. He can’t help but feel a little bit clinical about this. He can’t help but kind of associate sex with like, emptiness. Because he’s had far more bad experiences than good ones. Sex kind of holds a lot of heartbreak for him. It’s where he gets to feel the most vulnerable. And it’s where a lot of subtle rejection has happened to him. He has just been waiting for like — time and her love for him to erase at least _some_ of the negative associations. He just felt like he was kind of getting there — like, he was making some progress there. But apparently, just not fast enough for her.

This is also a recurring theme of his life. His healing just doesn’t happen fast enough for the people around him. His mom and dad didn’t understand why he was feeling pain longer than expected. Drogo didn’t understand why he didn’t want to go out and play and be normal again after the accident. His brother thought that burying his nose in books was avoidance instead of something pure. Like, Grey just liked books.

He holds his breath as he runs his hand up and down her inner thigh — and he figures that he’s probably being too slow and lackluster right now, too. So he just hooks his finger around the edge of her underwear and he tugs. He just starts taking it down her legs. He keeps watching her face for panic. She is breathing deeply. He has to get on his knees to help her get out of her panties. He watches her quietly step out of the soft and really insubstantial material. Her underwear is warm — and damp.

That freaks him out a little bit. So he drops it onto the ground.

And what the _fuck,_ she is frantically unbuttoning her shirt with shaky hands as he stands back up — which is _crazy._

It is _crazy_ because he was sure that she wasn’t going to allow him to have sex with her when they are both in this kind of angry mood. Like, he thought she’d be more . . . respectable than this? He thought she’d have more romantic notions. He thought she’d have more scruples.

She is really just pushing tiny buttons out of tiny holes.

And actually, Missandei really doesn’t have any scruples because _fuck scruples._ Fuck stupid ideas about how sex is supposed to go and what it’s supposed to look like and how it’s supposed to _feel._ She has been waiting _forever_ for this shit. And she is not going to let his _shit mood_ and _shit attitude_ ruin this for her.

She sighs in relief when her blouse finally falls open. Her bra is white. And when he reaches his hand underneath her skirt to cup her bare ass, her legs tremble, and she starts losing her balance.

She says, “Ha-ha, oh my God, I’m so drunk!” And then horrified, she spontaneously grabs onto him — with her hand around his belt. She urgently says, “That doesn’t mean stop! It doesn’t mean I’m too drunk to consent. I consent! _I consent!”_ She yanks his body to hers, throwing herself off-balance again. She lightly careens into the wall behind them, taking him with her. His hand on her ass squeezes harder — because that’s how he’s trying to save her from falling right to the floor — she is like, _yesss_ about it, as she winds her arms around his neck.

She kisses him. 

 

 

 


	57. Grey gets naked!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Title of this chapter says it all really.

 

 

So he snaps his face away from the kissing to push her against the nearest wall. It’s the wall next to his bedroom. Missy thinks it’s completely awesome and thrilling. She thinks this is some sexy-ass shit, and she wants to _eat him_ as her heart simultaneously just wants to tenderly burst apart in rainbow confetti.

Her legs, back, butt, and arms are strung up tight because this is just the _best thing._ She tilts her body and just boldly rubs and presses it against his body. She bites down a groan — she bites down on her bottom lip as she tries to look into his eyes so that she can smile like a dope at him, so they can really just bask in this shared experience together.

He is _really_ avoiding eye contact with her, because he’s pretty sure he’s going to make this really unsexy by losing it and crying if he looks her in the face. He has stopped being so angry, but his heart is still pounding so hard. He just feels like he’s swimming upstream, as his free hand — the one that is not under her skirt — reaches up to pull down one of her bra cups. There’s just a lot of white noise in his head, and he’s counterintuitively not paying that much attention to her as he dumbly watches her breast fall free from her bra. She gasps — he doesn’t really hear that — but he does watch as her nipple puckers. He is thinking that he usually just fucking loves her boobs so much, but he is just so anxious and nervous right now that he’s so afraid he’s going to mess everything up with her. Her boob is like — it is like, just a thing to him right now. It is neither the source of all his pain or the source of all of his happiness. He nervously tells himself that this middle ground is good. This middle ground is okay! Like, it’s going to be okay. Probably.

He kind of winces — braces himself for what is to come — and then he just kind of shuts his eyes and commits. He just hopes and hopes and hopes that this is alright and not like, monumentally awkward and terrible.

He uses the hand that is digging onto her ass to pick her up. He pushes her up the wall a few inches. He holds her there with his body. Her legs automatically come around him, around his waist. He is telling himself that he is probably going to be okay, and he owes this to her so he better just man up and _do this already_ — as he takes a hard lick across her exposed and sensitive skin with the flat of his tongue. It’s all texture — smoothness and a little bit of friction — and she tastes clean and a little perfumed. She gasps again — she says, “Oh my God” — and he is like, oh okay. He understands that this is going okay. So he repeats. Then he adds the rest of his mouth, his lips, his teeth, his breath. He bites down hard enough, on her soft, substantial breast.

She lets out a really long, really loud, really guttural groan-gasp. She simultaneously presses her back harder against the wall to get away from that mouth — as she digs her fingers into back of his head and forcefully pushes his face harder into her boob. She whimpers helplessly as she looks down at what is _happening to her body_. It is great. It is amazing. She wants to take a picture of this to remember how good he looks later. She is definitely into this. She is definitely turned on. She can feel this leaking wetness _just happening_ in between her legs. She was really wrong about sexual frustration. It’s really not at all thinking that he is adorable when he scrunches his face up before he sneezes. She now knows that sexual frustration is closer to the feeling that she is going to die in hopelessness if she doesn’t get off fast enough. She currently really wants to get off using his body. She now knows that _this_ is sex.

She has a lot more clarity now.

Her legs tighten around him pretty harshly. She starts unconsciously trying to grind into him, as she also tries to climb up higher on him, to get more of her boob into his mouth.

He slams her into the wall — accidentally. The energy that she is bringing is a little crazy. She is very responsive, and that is a little crazy. It is making his fears and his anxieties retreat deeper into his mind. His mouth breaks away from her breast in surprise, when he hears her body bounce against the wall with a dull thud.

He has rattled the both of them.

He looks up at her stunned — he thinks about starting to maybe apologize to her, ask her if she is alright and if that hurt — if it did, he is sorry. But then she grabs his head with both hands and angles it up. She swallows up his words into her mouth.

The kiss is a dirty, wet mess. She keeps groaning out her neediness as she just inelegant jams her tongue into his mouth and starts moving it against his harshly. She just digs her nails into the back of his skull to keep him from running away as she opens her mouth wide — trying to unhinge her jaw so she can swallow him up.

She unconsciously bucks against him. And in the rare moments that he allows himself to become sexually active with another person, sometimes he finds that he does weird, sad shit. Like, his body unconsciously thrusts up to meet her without him telling it to.

His eyes clench shut when he realizes what just happened. His anxiety immediately ratchets up to a fever pitch again. Dread floods him, and he wonders if she noticed — if she noticed how fucking sad and pathetic he is, and how sex just has a terrible way of revealing all of these secrets that he really just doesn’t want anyone to know about him.

Missy is completely not noticing any of this. She thought he bounced her up on purpose and intentionally. She thought it was cute and fun and sexy. She thinks it’s hot that he slammed her into the wall because he can’t handle how hot this is. She is trying to calm down enough to plan out next steps. She is trying to get brave enough to accomplish some goals.

The next time he accidentally slams her against the wall, it’s when she reaches behind to grab his wrist, where he has a handful of her ass. It’s when she angles her body toward him. She tilts her pelvis at him and braces her shoulder blades against the wall. She reasons that his hand on her ass is so close to her vagina. She can just help him _get there_. She pulls his hand further back, just full-on gets that hand in between her legs, by way of her butt. She just wants him to touch it for real — at least once. She simplistically has figured that she had to physically lead him to her boobs — so she probably has to physically lead him to her vagina, too.

He did not anticipate that it would go down like this _at all._ All of his freaked out fantasies seem so far away now — now that this is actually happening. He thought it would go down gentler, more carefully, slower. He thought they’d inch their way up to this. He thought he would kill some time getting the both of them acclimated to this kind of nakedness by like, giving her body a massage or something. He also thought he’d be going through the front. He did not anticipate that he’d be going around the back to get to her vagina.

A tortured sound comes out of his face, as he slams her backwards again — because his mind is breaking over the for-real sexual contact. She is really wet. She is really warm. She is like, really slippery. And really soft. Just really, really soft and nice.

The wall rattles, and her nails just _bite_ right into his scalp — right into his skull — as he continues to carefully and lightly touch her — in between her legs — just the superficial outside — just the blunt tips of his fingers skimming through the hair that she has kept fastidiously trimmed for _months_ now, for this very specific circumstance.

He puts his mouth back on her boob, sucking on it, biting down on nipple occasionally, timing it with more thorough sweeps of his fingers.

She clamps down on her lip, almost drawing blood. He is like, _really good at this._ And she groans loudly as he gently parts her. He touches a couple of fingers into the really warm, wet center of her. His face is really buried in her tit because he has to contort his arm and wrist a little bit, in the course of getting around her butt. He still can’t really look her directly in the face or else he’ll lose it.

With his hand in between her legs, he has convinced himself that he is only touching her a little bit, as he plainly says into her soft chest, “Okay, so this is basically sex. This is basically how it goes.”

She whimpers, as she focuses on the feel of his fingers really shallowly and slowly moving around down there. She grabs onto him tightly and holds mostly his head in a bracing, grateful hug as she whispers, “Uh, _yeah._ This is _awesome.”_

“Yeah, you think so?”

She whispers, “Yeah, it’s really, really _nice,”_ as she starts to tear up.

“How nice is it?” he asks, continuing to sound freakishly calm as he experimentally presses a little harder into her opening. It gives. He dips inside a little bit. He is like, _whoa,_ because he has this vague awareness that their relationship is undergoing this very subtle change — _right now._

Her voice is really cute as she softly mumbles, “It’s very nice. Like, very, very nice. I knew it would be, too.”

“Okay, let’s not gloat,” he says — surprised at how dry his voice manages to sound, because he is actually _losing his shit_ internally right now. He is like, _fingering Missandei_ right now. He had no idea he would be doing this to her, a year ago when they first met. When they first met, she wouldn’t even shake his hand. Now, a part of his body is touching the inside of her body. Life is just _nuts._

He asks her, “Do you _want me?”_ as a finger shallowly, but really easily slides into her.

Around another really forthright groan, she says, _“Ah!”_

He immediately freezes. Everything stops as his heart slams against his ribcage. He is trying to keep the panic out of his voice as he asks, “Is everything okay?” He tries to extract himself from her vagina without an answer anyway.

She bears down. She clenches around him — _everywhere_ — her legs, her arms, the inside of her. She says, “Stop!” and she means stop trying to run the fuck away from her. But it’s ambiguous, so he starts retreating even further. And then spontaneously, she pretty much slams her head backwards, right into the wall, in frustration.

To him, she says, “I want you — so _fucking much.”_ She is staring him in the face — in his eyes — as she says, “I want it so _fucking badly.”_

The way her face looks is probably the single sexiest thing he’s ever seen. Like ever.

And they really need to get away from the fucking wall. They are going to give her brain damage with this shit.

He says, “Okay,” as he continues to removes his wet hand from in between her legs. He smears his wet fingers across her bare ass as he extracts himself from back there. He then gently puts her back down on the ground and steps away from her and her feet drop back down to the floor unceremoniously.

She screams in frustration. She freaking advances on him and tries to punch him. She balls up her fist and throws it right into his shoulder in annoyance. He looks shocked that she is so angry again. She is actually thinking he’s fucking with her — sexually — _again._ She yells, “What the fuck, _Grey!_ Are we just done _already?”_

He tells her, “No, we’re not done. It’s just — the angle was a little rough. It was hard to really get in there.”

She immediately regrets her outburst, because he sounds so reasonable and now his hands are going to his body. He nudges his feet out of his shoes quickly, kicking them off and to the side carelessly. And then he looks down — at the both of them. Her skirt is bunched up high over her thighs — and so his hands go to the button of his jeans. Her eyes go wide.

And then she scrambles. She tells him, “Wait,” as she lays her hands on his wrists. She tells him, “I want to do this. I want to be the one to take your pants off.” She refrains from telling him that she has scripted some of this out in her head. She refrains from telling him that it’s been kind of a bucket list goal of hers, to physically peel his pants off him.

He blankly says, “Okay.”

She can see he is worried and nervous. This is why she says, “Baby, everything will be okay, I fucking promise you. I love you _so much,_ Grey.”

He says, “I know.”

She shakes off his nervousness. She tells herself that she will be confident enough for the both of them. She clears her head of his anxiety as she hilariously reaches up pushes her exposed boob back into her bra. She wants to try and look slightly more dignified as she gets this guy fucking _naked._ She grabs his hand and pulls him over to the couch. She pulls her skirt down and twists it around a little bit, straightening it before she sits down in front of him. Her face is right in his crotch. She awkwardly makes a joke. She says, “I don’t know why I’m trying to make myself look pretty for you right now. I mean, this is all coming off later, right?”

He looks totally scared to death. He is not smiling or laughing or _anything._

Awesome.

So she quickly unbuckles his belt. Then she pushes against his metal button with her thumb, pushing it out of the buttonhole. She leans forward and kisses him on his stomach to try and reassure him — that it’s going to be okay. She completely does not anticipate being an asshole and recoiling in horror when she sees him for the first time. She has no plans to just ruin the very best thing that has ever happened to her and hurt the person that currently means the most to her in the entire world — like, _why_ would she ever even _do this?_

He just fucking _loves_ that her face is right up in his business — just right in front of his genitals. It is just awesome. It seems like an awesome straight on view for her. It seems like just the most flattering way to look at this — with her nose just inches away from the good stuff. He thinks that this is just fucking awesome.

She pulls down his zipper. She pulls apart the flaps of his jeans. She lets his loosened pants drop to the ground. The belt thumps when it hits the hardwood floor. It’s a new sound for her — the sound of a man’s pants hitting the ground. She tells herself that this is the start of it. She is going to be so sexually active after this! She is going to be super used to that sound after this!

She is actually really nervous, too. Her heart is actually also pounding in her throat — as she reaches out and softly touches him through his boxers, with the warm palm of her hand. He says, “Fuck” — and not in a sexy, turned on kind of way. He says it like he is just miserable.

He feels pretty much like how she anticipated he’d feel. Soft. Substantive. Mostly scrotum and testes. It’s nice. He is like — a real man and not like — it’s not just like flat and smooth and plastic like a Ken doll. He feels delicate and vulnerable, actually. He feels really cute, actually. He’s her baby, actually.

She is stopping herself from awkwardly ejecting this play-by-play out of her mouth. She senses that it will not go over well, even though the overarching message is that she fucking _loves this person so much oh my God._

He actually cannot fucking _believe_ how long this woman is spending on this shit. He cannot believe that it’s practically been fucking _hours_ since she first put her hand on his junk. He should _not_ have let her take the reins on this. He should’ve just taken off his pants by himself. He was planning on ripping them off really fast — like an exotic dancer would. He was not planning on fucking milking the shit out of this like she is poverty-stricken and this is the only food that she will ever get in life so she better savor it.

He can’t take it anymore. Finally, he nervously says, “Missandei. What do you think?”

“I love you,” she says automatically.

He says, “That’s nice. But I mean, about what you’re touching right now.”

She says, “That _is_ what I’m thinking about what I’m touching right now. I’m thinking that I fucking love you.”

This answer sounds like a complete and total cop out to him. He says, “Oh, okay. Are you like, gonna be done soon? Should I take off the rest of it or do you want to? Or should I put my pants back on? Or do you want to?”

In response to all of that, she steadily says, “Baby, you are _okay.”_

Again, he says, “I _know.”_ He thinks that he’s being super cool and nice about this, because she’s being super obvious right now. Because of course he’s okay. He’s always okay. Okay is what he is really good at. He will always make himself okay, no matter what.

From her vantage point, he does _not_ look okay at all. His face does not reflect okayness at all. His face is tortured and tense and emotional — like he’s trying to hold it all back.

She doesn’t even know what she can say or do to make him believe that it is truly, _truly_ going to be okay for him. She doesn’t want to infantilize him and treat him like he’s a wounded little boy — even though that’s sometimes all she can think about when she looks at him when he is scared. She doesn’t want to put on an overly sexy affectation, because he will feel like she is playing it up to assuage his fragile male ego. She actually does not have a lot of room to make mistakes here. Because he is fucking _insane._ She knows that he is just fucking crazy. And she totally loves this about him.

She is opting to keep it all observational, clinical, and truthful. She tells him, “I want to take your underwear off. I’m going to do that now, okay?”

“Sure,” he says. “Go nuts.”

She grabs onto his boxers, pinching at the elastic waistband. They are dark blue, and she thinks they are nice. She pulls them down. She observes that this is a totally different feel from how it was — when he pulled down her underwear earlier. This is a lot more tense.

She needs his help, so he touches her shoulder for balance as he nudges his underwear the rest of the way down his legs and steps out of them.

Then he is completely naked.

She smiles — to herself — when she gets a good look at him. Relief honestly completely floods her and warms up her entire face and body. Like, she was _really sure_ that she was going to be really fucking cool about this — like, _so sure._ But yeah, apparently she’s also a dirty liar and likes to lie to her own self — because the relief that she currently feels is immense. It’s so huge that she realizes a part of her, deep down, really _was_ close to equally as afraid as he was, that she was not going to take this well at all — because she’s secretly a fucking terrible person who doesn’t know what love really is.

She is trying not to touch him just yet, not before asking for permission to. She is trying be as casual and as cool about this as she can be. He has tan lines, which is totally unexpected! And it’s totally adorable! His skin goes a little lighter and more hairless at his upper thigh — creamier and more delicate. This area of his body gets no sun ever. It’s like the tree line of a mountain, but on his body!

She looks him over for scar tissue. He’s not super hairy so it’s easy for her to see most of everything. She finds that his surgeons must’ve done a good job, because there’s minimal scarring. She inhales deeply — she tries to do it discreetly — but it’s pretty obvious. She is smelling him. She finds that his area of his body also smells like soap and his laundry detergent.

She tilts her head a little bit. She notes that his balls are a little asymmetrical, but that seems normal. Her boobs are also asymmetrical. Like, her left boob is bigger than the right. She is trying to figure out if it’s the same for him. It takes her a second or two to realize that _it is._ The left hangs a little lower.

“Holy shit, you are so quiet,” he says — nervously. “What the fuck is going on in your head, Missandei?”

“Can I kiss you?” she asks.

He looks down at her, confused. He thinks she means on the mouth or somewhere else safe. So he says, “You can always kiss me.”

In response to his permission-giving, she contorts herself a little bit. She bends her body and her neck down so that she can press a soft kiss against where he was injured.

The floodgates kind of open after that. He starts just physically pushing her face away from his body — carefully and gently. He starts kind of hyperventilating and tearing up.

He is in _shock_ that he is reacting this way. He bends over and pulls up his boxers really quickly, shielding himself back up again. He starts backing away from her because now he feels like a real dillhole — it’s now embarrassing. He mutters, “Oh my God,” as he turns around and then starts randomly picking up their discarded clothes. He throws his pants and his shirt over his arm. He carefully lays her blouse and her panties over the back of the armchair. It is ridiculous. He should probably actually wash her underwear for her.

He reaches up to his face with both of his hands and awkwardly wipes away the wetness there.

She ends up standing up to walk over to him. She ends up wrapping her arms around his body and pulling him into a hug. She ends up pressing her mouth against his face as she tells him that it’s okay — in the general sense and also that he’s freaking out right now. It’s okay to be freaking out right now. She asks him if he wants to do laundry — sounding so fucking _serious_ and _supportive_ about it. She asks, “Will it make you feel better if we do a load together?”

He is stunned. His clothes are hugged and smushed in between their bodies. He tells her he doesn’t even know what the fuck is wrong with him — and he doesn’t mean his body — he means his head. He tells her he doesn’t know why this shit makes him so fucking emotional. It happened so long ago. He’s lived like this for his entire adult life. Plenty of other people have seen his entire body. He’s had sex plenty of times before. He just doesn’t understand why he is fucking flipping out right now.

He walks into the bedroom to dump his clothes into his laundry basket. He then collapses onto his bed and rolls onto his back. He throws his arm over his face, to cover his eyes — which won’t _stop leaking._ He mutters, “I’m so sorry, Missandei. I’m sorry this is so sexy.”

She laughs — quietly and genuinely. She feels light and her body feels languid as she climbs into bed next to him. She drapes her body half over his, feeling the rigid underwire of her bra flex uncomfortably against her ribcage. She reaches around to just unhook her bra and take it off. She throws it onto the ground.

She presses her face into his chest. She squeezes him in a hug. She actually tells him, “I think that was awesome. I actually think that went really, really well. You have a really nice body, baby. I mean, I already knew that, and I’ve told you so — but, you know, now that I’ve seen all of it, maybe now you will actually believe me.”

 

 

 


	58. Grey is feeling tender

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The day after the big night, Missy pretty much just parties hard. Grey is super emotional and freaked out about it. He goes running to his mommy and daddy.

  

 

  
Dany psychotically rearranges her entire schedule to free up lunch when she learns that Missandei like, “kind of” _did it._ Naturally, Dany learns of this through group text and, rather than go through another frustrating rigmarole that unfolds over long hours, Dany just made her assistant move around her one o’clock and her three o’clock and also her dinner plans. This sets off a butterfly effect into motion that results in Kara getting nervous sweat stains underneath her armpits — all just so that Dany has time to trek her ass downtown to eat with her bestie.

Dany shows up in a designer suit, a designer haircut, a designer handbag, designer shoes, and designer perfume. Missy is wearing a shirt that costs less than what they are spending on lunch. The cumulative effect of Dany’s outfit psychs Missy out enough for her to pre-emptively blurt out, “Oh man! I don’t know if my life is interesting enough for lunch to be worth it for you! Oh man, nothing really big happened!” Missy realizes that Dany is hemorrhaging money every time Dany takes time out of work to spend time with Missy.

Dany actually thinks that there is probably no other person — beyond maybe Drogo sometimes — that Dany would give up money for. However, there is sometimes a blockage inside of her chest that prevents her from expressing emotional truth. This is why she just mildly says, “Don’t be silly. I’m sure you’re going to be interesting enough today.”

Missandei is not reassured whatsoever. Over chicken salads, Missandei rambles nervously. She opens it up by getting kind of philosophical and existential and asks Dany when sex qualifies as sex anyway? Because no one orgasmed and penetration lasted for like, two seconds tops — does that still make it sex?

Dany tepidly says that if Missandei feels that what happened was sex, then it was sex. Simple. Dany arches a brow, suppresses a shit-eating grin, and says, “So, what happened? Leave no disgusting detail out. Did you poop on him? I know that was a worry you had.”

Missy lets out a sound — like a quiet exclamation of humiliation and pain. It makes Dany raise her brow and wonder in shock if Missandei actually did poop on Grey — but then Missy quickly says, “I did _not_ poop on him.” Missy reaches out and raps on the table a couple of times. “Knock on wood, that I can keep this streak going.” Missy pauses. “Oh, ew. Streak. Was that an accidental pun?”

“Babe,” Dany says, trying to get her friend’s attention back on the matter at hand. “The actual sex?”

“Oh, yes. So the sex.” Missy happens to think this is good practice — she _must_ be able to talk about sex without blushing so hard. She must be mature about this. Because she is an adult woman, and not a giggling teenage girl who has never been touched by a man before.

She actually slowly starts off with, “So, I know the touch of a man now. That’s pretty nuts.” As her heart pounds underneath stress and adrenaline, Missandei forces herself to crassly tell Dany that Grey put his fingers on and inside of her vagina. He kind of banged her against a wall — kind of literally and figuratively. Like, he kept snapping her into the wall because he was like — he seemed like he was kind of having a nice time. With her. Missy says that she knows she’s talking about this really hesitantly and really carefully because she feels shy, but the fact of the matter is that it was _hot as shit._ She’d rate it ten out of ten. Would definitely do again. He touched her from behind — because she made him do it that way, like a boss. Like, he had to curl his forearm around her ass. Like, he really had to _dig,_ to get to _it._ And when he did, it was really fucking _sexy._

Through clenched teeth, Dany says, “Oh my God. I love _everything_ about this. It’s so weird how much I love this.” Dany then adds, “I am having a hard time picturing the butt part.”

So Missandei awkwardly tries to recreate it in her dining chair, by reaching her hand around her back and lightly touching her own butt. She says, “Kind of like this — pretend my arm is his arm — pretend the back of this chair is a wall,” as she makes her arm go up and down just a little bit. And then she gestures to her left boob with her free hand. She says, “And then imagine his mouth — right _here.”_ She stares at Dany with her eyes just blown open wide — because she is still in disbelief — that it happened, and also that she is demonstrating this for her best friend.

Dany’s jaw like drops — both because she never in her wildest dream ever would’ve imagined that Missandei would mime a sex act in the middle of a busy restaurant with _other people_ around — and also because that is just not what Dany thought their first time would be like. “That’s so _dirty,”_ Dany says. “I didn't think you'd guys be so _dirty.”_

“Oh, you’ve thought about this too?” Missandei says in surprise.

“Like, Drogo and I literally talk about it once a week.”

“That’s so interesting!” Missandei says, leaning forward on her elbows. She is grinning widely. “What did you think our first time would look like?” she says cheerfully, kind of conspiratorial. “Because you know what? It’s not what I expected either!”

“I thought you’d do it in a bed for one,” Dany says.

“Me too! I thought that, too!”

“I thought the lights would be off, or dimmed,” Dany adds. “And there would be like, soft music. And candles. And I thought you guys would be like, under the blankets. He’d be on top. And you’d guys would stare into each other’s eyes and kiss for a long time —”

“Okay, wow,” Missandei interrupts. “You really _have_ thought _a lot_ about this.”

Dany is nodding her head — in an admission of guilt. She says, “Yeah, babe. I have thought _a lot_ about this. I just really wanted it to happen for you guys.”

“Why is your fantasy of us so virginal and romantic though?” Missandei asks. “Candles? Under the covers? With the lights off? Staring into each other eyes? Really, Dany? _Really?_ Should I feel insulted?”

“Maybe,” Dany says honestly, shrugging in bewilderment. “I am like — seeing you in a different light right now. It’s so weird. It’s like, you think you know a person, and then you learn that they like getting fucked into a wall. It’s like —” Dany spears a piece of chicken and shoves it into her mouth. “It’s like when people learn that their older sister is really their mom or something.”

“Yeah, it’s just like that.” Missandei laughs, because she was meant to laugh at that. She also crams more salad into her face. She talks through a full mouth as she says, “Can I tell you a secret?”

“What?”

“I think I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him,” she says matter-of-factly. “Like, don’t tell him I said that. He’s going to freak out. But between you and me, I’m pretty sure he’s _it_ for me.”

“The sex was _that_ promising?”

Missandei shakes her head. She says, “No. Well, yes. But no, it’s not the sex that makes me feel that way. I’ve been thinking about this, um, for a while now. But I was just like . . . it’s scary to say things out loud because if we break up tomorrow, I will look like a real freaking idiot and loser.”

“Oh my _God,”_ Dany says through a mouth full of masticated food. She is bypassing all of the heartfelt stuff because she is just terrible with feelings. Drogo is right about her.

So, instead of talking about this kinda-momentous confession, Dany instead says, “You’re such a pervert, Missandei. And I _love it._ Who _knew!_ Also, how come no one had an orgasm?”

 

 

  
In contrast to Missandei’s leisurely day, Grey has a stressful and taxing day. First, he gets to work in a rush because he overslept on purpose to try and fucking shake off his hangover. The extra sleep only blunted the edges of his hangover a little. It is still what he’d qualify as “raging” by the time his first meeting of the day is over.

He is already cranky, so when he comes across some real sloppiness in the workflow — tasks did not get logged as completed in the way that he has asked people to log tasks — he goes a little nuts and lectures all of the interns in one fell swoop about why they do things the way that they do them. He makes it clear that he doesn’t create procedures just for the fucking fun of it. They have to follow protocol because he’s been doing this shit for a long time and he knows the problems that can arise when they don’t log tasks exactly like how he spelled it out for them. Grey cannot believe he has to say things that are intuitive — but he actually spells out to them something that basically amounts to “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” He tells them he doesn’t want to be fucking embarrassed in front of clients. And they are fucking starting to embarrass him right now.

This is when Tish speaks up. He doesn’t even know where she has found the balls, but she raises her hand when he’s not even _taking questions_ and she says, “Excuse me? Hi, I just want to say that we really, really appreciate your expertise on this. We really appreciate your guidance and mentorship on this.” And then she stops talking.

And he actually looks over at Selmy for a brief moment — because what the actual fuck?

Selmy shrugs.

Grey looks Tish in the face and says, “Your name was the one that logged tasks incorrectly, Tish. You realize this, right? You realize that everyone is learning a lesson from your work, right?”

Maybe she didn’t actually know this. Because in response to his biting words, she looks just _crushed_ with embarrassment as her colleagues shuffle around uncomfortably.

And for the rest of the day, Grey basically wonders if he was a total dick to Tish because he is having an off-day. Or if he was a dick to her because he is hungover. Or maybe he was a dick to her because she flirted with him and Missandei has gotten into his fucking _head,_ and he is misdirecting his frustration right now.

He talks to Selmy about it. His boss is unconcerned. His boss thinks that he was fine and that everyone has already forgotten. His boss tells him that Tish’s work _is_ sloppy, and maybe being shamed in front of everyone is the only way she will learn.

 

 

  
She isn’t text-talking with him very much — because based on what she knows about this person, based on what he has presented to her in the past, like when she told him she loves him and he repeated it back at her and then proceeded to kill a couple of weeks by being waaay fucking standoffish with her — she knows that he is probably losing his mind today. She figures that he is probably just all out of sorts, and he’s probably not going to reach out and call or want to talk to her for like, three days or something.

This is why she eagerly agrees to ladies’ happy hour. This is why she decides to see Dany _twice_ in one weekday. Yara starts the plans — she also wants to get together to chat and to drink — mostly to drink. On group text, Irri was like: _Fuck yeah!_ about it even though Irri actually rarely ever says “fuck yeah!” verbally.

Dany gets FOMO when Missy agrees to meet at a rice wine bar that Yara has been eyeing. Missy says: _Rice wine! Yes! I can totally drink that!_

Dany makes Kara rearrange her schedule _again,_ just so she doesn’t get left out of happy hour.

Missy also says: _I’m not going to to drink a lot, okay? I was already drunk yesterday. I don’t want to make this a thing._

 

  
Grey defies all expectations that people have of him by picking up his phone at four o’clock and scrolling through to his message thread with Missandei. He quickly writes: _Hey, what’s up?_

And without waiting for a response, he quickly types out: _Wanna come over? Or I can go to your place?_

It takes her a full forty-five minutes before she responds. He is anxious during that entire time — because she usually is pretty responsive with text — so she is probably not responding because she thinks he is hideous and she doesn’t love him anymore now that she’s seen him naked. Just normal, predictable, reasonable stuff like that.

When she finally does respond, he leaps for his phone right away, on his desk.

She has written: _Ooh! I’m going out for some drinks with friends. I’m sorry! I didn’t know you’d want to see me! Do you want to join us?_

 

 

  
Grey goes to the gym after work because he figures that he probably shouldn’t crash Missandei’s date with her friends just because he can’t fucking handle being alone.

He stops at his apartment to change out of his work clothes and into his workout gear. He generally avoids looking at his naked body or touching himself. Because his mind is just _throbbing_ hotly over the memory of it all.

He remembers being really nervous and really strung tight as she took off his pants. He remembers just dying inside as he stood around pathetically and she just scanned her eyes over all of his shit. He definitely fucking remembers freaking out on her, tearing up, and pulling up his pants like he is twelve years old and got bashful at a public urinal again.

He also remembers crying in bed as she held onto him and told him he was going to be okay. He remembers that no one got even close to an orgasm because _this_ is how _good_ he is at _sex._

He also remembers the part where she yelled at him and told him that she doesn’t think he tries hard enough in their relationship. He remembers her conveying to him that she does all of the work and he just like, throws up obstacles and is terrible to be around and stuff.

He ends up finishing his workout with a swim. He jumps feet-first into the pool and just expels air from his lungs, letting himself slowly sink down to the floor of the pool. Maybe he will just drown. Maybe he will just become a fish and live in the ocean now. He randomly wonders how fish fuck.

 

 

  
The Grey portion of happy hour is over and done with quickly. Missandei tells Yara that she _did_ take off his pants and she does know what he’s got going on under there. She tells Yara she’s not going to describe it to Yara at all, because Grey is really private and probably would not appreciate her giving a sketch-artist description of his genitals to her friends — so Yara can just die not knowing.

Missy kind of has a moony smile plastered onto her face, whenever she says his name. Yara is stopping herself from mentioning it, even though she wants to tell Missy to cut it the fuck out. Missy’s face grosses Yara the fuck out and makes her want to vomit. Love is disgusting.

Missy also asks Yara if Yara still thinks Missy is a bigot.

Yara slams her fists down on the table and growls, “For the _last time,_ I _never_ said _you_ were a _bigot!_ I said Irri was!”

Irri kind of hops in her seat at that, a little startled. And she already knows that Yara feels this way. Irri knows this information. She is playing it really cool and calm because she’s trying to like, grow from this and be chill. She says, “Hey, for the record, if I wasn’t such a bigot, Missandei and Grey may have never have gotten together. Like, am I the hero of their relationship? Who can say? But many would say yes.”

 

 

  
“Sup, guys?” he says, as he enters the house, as he drags his tired body toward the dinner table.

His dad is in the middle of plating some sliced skirt steak onto a plate. His dad looks at him and says, “Um, hey. Um, I thought I was having a nice dinner with just your mom, but uh — did you call her or something?”

Grey’s mom answers for him. She is holding a chardonnay, and she has turned around in her chair so she is sitting in it backwards. She says, “He did not.”

Grey is looking at both of his parents — just _stunned._ He already feels really fucking stupid, as he says, “I didn’t realize I had to like, ask you guys permission to come over?”

“Oh,” his dad says — also kind of uncharacteristically embarrassed, too. “You don’t. Obviously you don’t. You’re our kid and we love you and this is still your house. I just . . . didn’t make any dinner for your ass.”

“Uh, maybe give us a heads up next time, baby?” his mom suggests.

Grey tilts his face up to the ceiling. He mutters, “Oh my God.” And then he says, “I can go.”

“No, that’s just sad and depressing,” his dad says gruffly. “Sit down. I’ll just portion this shit out for three people. And I can like, toss another salad or something.”

“Sit, baby,” his mom says, patting the chair next to her.

Grey looks like he’s about to resist — but then he deflates. He relents. He slides into the seat and then sighs as he reaches up to take a glass of beer that his dad is holding out to him.

He belatedly realizes that his dad is giving him his beer. Like, this is their brew. They have to go down into the garage for refills of this shit. His dad is giving his son his only glass.

Grey mutters, “Oh my God. I am literally the worst.”

Pretty quickly, he also realizes that he didn’t just interrupt his parents’ dinner together, but he actually interrupted like, a _romantic_ dinner. The food that his dad made is really nicely plated. There is really soft baby-making old-school R&B pumping out of the speakers. The lights are dimmed. His mom looks really pretty and like, soft. Like, she fluffed up her hair and put on lipstick. There is cleavage. And his dad is oddly demure and quiet — just struggling to find cutting things to criticize Grey about, as if his dad was really locked into like, sexy mode and not like the mode of smashing Grey’s self-confidence to bits.

Next to him, his mom clears her throat as she slices into her really, really nicely seared beef. She says, “How was your day, honey?” She is talking to Grey.

Grey is shaking his head. He likes how both of his parents have committed to making their entire lives about their children. He says, “Fuck my day. Seriously, do you want me to leave so you guys can like . . . keep on doing whatever you were . . . gonna do?”

“Kind of,” his dad says.

“Kamau.”

“He asked!”

His mom has serious mom-guilt, which is an affliction his dad suffers way less from. His dad is okay with him leaving. _Grey_ is okay with leaving. His mom is refusing to let him leave. His mom has her hand clamped onto his forearm, basically holding him in place, as she tells him that he is not interrupting anything and that they are glad he likes his parents enough to come around.

His mom has mom-guilt from the years that she left him to fend for himself because she thought it’d make him stronger and also because she had to work. She was right. It _did_ make him stronger and she _did_ have to work, but nonetheless, she has missed a lot of cuddle time and a lot of bonding time and a lot of just _togetherness._ One of the things that she and his father have talked a lot about — during her husband’s illness — was that life is short and they could be taken away from each other at any moment. Life is just too precious to waste.

So she holds her youngest in place and asks, “Have you Missandei had sex together yet?”

He says, “Oh my God,” as he smacks his forehead into the dining table.

The dishes rattle and his dad admonishes him. His dad says, “Christ, son. Dramatic much?”

Having a really romantic dinner with his parents really just _fucks_ with his brain. He ends up just telling them both the unadorned truth, because why the fuck not? They are creepily close and like, there’s been a lot of Al Green coming out of the speakers and his dad just doesn’t have the sensitivity to like, change the playlist.

He tells them that yes, kind of? He tried at least. And then he started bawling. So that kind of like, ruined the mood.

He tries to keep the story fact-oriented, like how his dad likes. He tries to remove emotion from it — so the retelling kind of feels out-of-body, like it didn’t really happen to him. It doesn’t hurt him to admit to them that he ended up crying for hours in bed afterward. And today, Missandei has been kind of ignoring him all day. She is probably legitimately busy. But his anxiety is also a monster right now, so his brain keeps telling him that watching him cry the way he did maybe has altered the way she feels about him. He came over to their house for dinner because he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts anymore. He was hoping they’d distract him.

His dad generally just watches his son try really, really hard to keep it together — and his dad wonders if this is what he accidentally has done to his son. He used to have this argument with Grey’s mom a lot, back when Grey was in his early twenties and not really a part of their lives. She used to angrily tell him that he was driving her children away with his awful inflexibility. He used to tell her to wait. And see.

When his son came back — changed — he crammed this fact in his wife’s face. He told her he was right, and she was just impatient and scared.

He might have a few regrets right now.

He gets out of his chair. He looks down at his kid and he says, “Stand up. And don’t be weird about this.”

Grey looks up at his dad suspiciously. He pretty much knows what is happening.

He stands up anyway. And he holds his arms out.

His dad tries to joke about it as he hugs him. His dad grips him and says, “Your mom says I don’t hug you enough, and that’s why you are the way you are. I told her that she didn’t make you dinner enough as a kid and she didn’t go to enough parent-teacher conferences — and that’s why you are the way you are.”

“Kamau.”

Grey tries to break the hug — because he starts crying again. He tries to break the hug because he’s a fucking basketcase and he’s trying to wipe his face on something that isn’t his dad’s shirt.

His dad doesn’t let him break the hug, which is expected and also terrible. He thinks that it’s rough enough to contend with how his relationship with Missandei has probably changed. It is also rough to deal with his parents’ regrets with how they raised him because this is the kind of tone and quality that conversations take on when old people are _near death._ So he is thinking about the death of his relationship right now. And also the inevitable death of his parents. And he’s just not handling it gracefully at all.

He can’t really tell these two assholes why he is crying so much, beyond general weakness — which makes him feel small already. The mischaracterization of his emotions always makes him feel silly and young.

Grey’s dad holds onto him even tighter — as his son just _loses it._ Grey’s dad is shocked — and he also starts to assume the very worst. He feels like he was definitely a really terrible father at times, and that’s why this person that he made is just in so much pain, but cannot ever express it. His kid is just hurt all the time, and he has made his kid just so scared to just be honest with him.

So he starts crying a little bit, too.

 

 

  
“Well, that was fucking _terrible,”_ his dad gripes, after they finally let each other go and grab tissues from Grey’s mom. “Great idea, Sanaa.”

Grey’s mom is unfazed. In her line of work, she has seen what happens when men are forced into a very narrow box of what it means to be men. Like, they become really violent and hurt other people.

She tells them this — her husband and her son. They look at her like they cannot even believe her right now, with just about the same identical face — just different ages.

And then for the rest of dinner, they talk about sexually transmitted infections. It’s because Grey’s dad is feeling raw, and he just needs to grasp onto something he absolutely is in command of, to regain some semblance of control.

He asks Grey when the last time he got checked was.

Grey is like, “Uhhh.”

Grey’s dad is like, _“Not smart,_ Nudho.” He tells Grey that lots of infections are asymptomatic, and it’d be a real asshole move for him to infect Missandei with like, gonorrhea or chlamydia. He tells Grey that those things can seemingly lie dormant for years and then _bam,_ infertility and _death._ His dad says, “Is that what you want to do to her?”

He says, “Uh . . . no?”

“And make _her_ get tested, too. Don’t take her word for it. Because women sometimes don’t even know _what is going on_ and you don’t want to let some woman’s vagina mess up your life. Right, Sanaa?”

“Shut up, oh my _God.”_

 

 

  
Missandei is sometimes a really corny motherfucker, so she calls happy hour Fri-Yay once again before she embraces each one of her friends and says goodbye to them. She hugs Yara, she hugs Dany, and then she hugs Irri, who asks her if she’s okay to drive.

Missy has only had one and a half cups of rice wine. It’s been three hours. She announce, “I am good!” She touches her finger to the tip of her nose and then she walks a straight, imaginary line.

“What are you doing?” Yara asks.

“A sobriety test?”

“From like, the 1950s?” Yara says, grinning as she crosses her arms. “Your entire family is made up of cops, Missandei!”

Missandei points at Yara. “Believe it or not, I have never been pulled over for driving under the influence before.”

 

 

  
He is drinking coffee and — seriously — doing a crossword puzzle on the couch with his dad as his mom does a sudoku in her armchair — when his phone rings.

He mutters, “Oh shit,” when he sees who is calling. He’s waving his dad’s inquisitive look off as, into his phone, he says, “Hey, what’s up?” And then after a pause, he says, “Yeah, sure. But I’m like, with my parents right now.”

 

 

 

 


	59. Missy and Grey go on a condom run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy and Grey get together. She tries to get sexy with him. He becomes a major mood killer because he is so shy. They talk about safe sex. And then they take a field trip to the grocery store!

 

 

  
She tells him that she wants to see him, if he’s still up for it? He hesitates on the phone with her — because he doesn’t know what kind of mind game she is playing with him. He isn’t sure if he’s supposed to go running to her every time she beckons, if they are just always on her schedule and pivoting around her whims.

So he tells her that he’s kind of currently in the middle of something with his parents. Missandei is cool about it. She cheerily says, “Oh! Okay. When do think you’ll be free?”

“Um, I don’t know?”

His dad is sitting close enough to him that his dad can hear her side of the conversation. His dad is rolling his eyes because his kid is sometimes a fucking idiot — and this is probably his own fault. He thought he was making his son really smart, but really, he kind of made his son really unromantic and sometimes bad at reading subtlety.

He gently shoves his kid into a decorative pillow. He loudly says, “Leave my house. I want to get busy with your mom, and you have overstayed your welcome.”

 

 

  
He only lives five minutes away from his parents, so he gets there before she does. He spends twenty minutes trying to like, prepare for her, but not prepare _too hard,_ not to the point where she can tell he prepared for her.

He changes out of his gym clothes for instance. He doesn’t want to look cute or handsome, so he jumps into his rattiest clothes. He is wearing a threadbare baby blue t-shirt that has palm trees and anthropomorphized beer bottles emblazoned on it. He thinks this shirt is hilarious. And it’s also really comfortable. It’s been stretched out nicely.

He brushes the shit out of his teeth because he drank beer and generally worries if his excessive teeth brushing is wearing down his enamel. He actually legitimately starts being a little scared about that because at dinner, there was some cold sensitivity but maybe he imagined that. Nevertheless, he starts avidly Googling on his phone.

He doesn’t know where to put himself. He doesn’t want to put himself in the bedroom even though he’s kind of tired. He doesn’t want her to come over and find him in bed and think about sex or, worse yet, think about how he just cried his eyes out in bed just yesterday.

He wonders if sitting on the couch is just too forced and too deliberate.

That’s where he ends up, hugging a pillow to his chest, pulling up his thick blanket and arranging it over his legs. He then turns on the TV. He finds something to watch. He thinks, oh yeah, this is not bad. He slouches down a little bit, and then he full-on just lies down, resting his head on his pillow.

 

 

  
He is asleep on his sofa when she quietly lets herself in. She spots the blue glow of his TV and she doesn’t even need to see him to know that he is unconscious.

She silently toes off her boots so that they don’t click on his floor. She hangs her coat up in his hallway closet. She still smells like brisk air — like the outside — as she scurries over so that she can take a peek at him.

Oh my God, so fucking _cute._ What the fuck.

This is what she thinks to herself as her entire body pleasantly tingles, as the ball in her chest grows and becomes warm.

They seem to have developed a rule between them — from the early days of their relationship. She cannot mess with him while he is asleep. In all honestly, this rule may have changed, because it was created back before they have carved out all of this intimacy — but she is still a little gunshy about touching him while he is asleep. They had a really terrible fight about it. She doesn’t want to have that fight ever again.

So she tends to wake him up before she lets herself give him affection. Sometimes — like now — she feels bad about it because he looks so peaceful and so fucking cute.

She lightly runs her knuckles over his cheekbone. She says, “Babe. I’m here. Do you want to go to bed?”

He jolts awake — gasping in shock. He didn’t expect to have fallen asleep, so the immediate realization of that is smacking into his consciousness.

The extremeness of his response actually makes her straighten in slight concern. She pulls her hand away from his face. She says, “Sorry, Grey. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

 

 

  
He ignorantly just continues doing just a bunch of cute shit, as he groggily gets used to being awake again. He looks really soft and slow, as he blinks up at her and quietly talks to her. He says nothing really revolutionary — he tells her he didn’t mean to fall asleep. He asks her if she’s been here long. He asks her if she had a fun night. He asks her if she’s eaten already, because he can like, get up and cook her something if she’s hungry.

She pretty much just wants to smush herself against _all of that._ He looks warm and cozy. He probably smells really nice. She wants to rub her makeup off in his neck. She wants to burrow under the blanket with him. She wants to nuzzle him, facing away from the TV, as he presses a hand to her back and absently watches his show.

“What time is it?” he mumbles.

“Nine-thirty,” she says.

“Wow, that’s . . . early.”

She lightly chuckles.

He’s slowly rubbing his face with his palm and pulling his feet up on his couch cushions as he pretty much decides that he _really_ does _not_ want to talk about heavy stuff. He has had a day, a really emotionally labor-intensive day.

Even though he is kind of exhausted, he feels like it’s probably too early for them to go to bed. He asks her, “What do you feel like doing?” even though their options are pretty limited. It’s dark outside. He’s not dressed for going out. They have both already eaten.

“You wanna keep watching TV?” she asks.

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll try not to fall back asleep.”

Her clothes are nice — she’s still in her work clothes and she pulls up her ironed slacks a little bit before she sits down next to him. She grabs a flap of blanket and pulls it over her own lap. Her hand searches for his right away, underneath.

And she doesn’t really intend for this and she didn’t really plan it out this way, but she starts going for his mouth like — _right away._ Her face pitches forward and then she stops herself with a snap. Her lips are just a scant inch away from his as she quietly asks, “Is your mouth good?” And then she smiles in reflex, because she meant if he is poisoned with gluten, but it came out all sexy.

He quietly says, “Uh, yeah.”

And then she smashes her mouth against his. She groans as she shuts her eyes, as this familiarity and this new kind of closeness takes over. She deepens the kiss with her tongue. She inches herself close to him, pressing her chest into his arm. She slips her hand underneath his shirt — his skin is so warm, verging on hot.

She rubs his chest up and down as she drags her wet mouth from his lips to his cheek. She lays a kiss there, before she presses her face into his neck, before her tongue flicks out to lick his skin.

She’s not even thinking very much about it, as she boldly moves her hand in between his legs and just cups him in her hand. She lightly bites down on the column of his neck. She hears him slowly say, “Holyyyy shit.”

She tells him, “You taste salty,” as she slowly and comprehensively starts rubbing him.

“I, uh, went to the gym. Today.”

“Yeah?” she whispers into his ear. “What did you do at the gym?”

“Um, I worked out.”

She asks him, “What did you work out?” as her hand dips underneath the waistband of his pants. She easily finds the slit in his boxers. She smiles with tension, to herself, as she makes skin to skin contact. It is warm and damp in there. She groans as she watches his eyelashes flutter — as his expression changes. He’s not paying attention to their conversation, so she has to prompt him. She says, “Baby. What did you work out today?”

“Um, today was leg day.”

“So you did squats?”

“Yeah. Maybe,” he says absently, staring down at his lap. The blanket is shielding all of the illicit stuff that is happening in his pants. He says, “Ah, I mean — yeah, I did squats.”

“Nice.”

He then winces when she squeezes too hard.

She says, “Sorry. Too hard?”

This completely switches their entire conversation. It goes from broad, inane ramblings about his workout as a means of distracting him from what is going on in his pants to a direct focus on exactly what is going on in his pants. He actually answers truthfully. He says, “Yeah. I’m a little sensitive.”

“What do you need more of?” she asks urgently, pausing her hand, pressing her lips back against his neck.

He says, “Umm.” And then he also pauses.

She is eager. Her body is humming. She is really turned on. She needs to get something going here. She also really wants to see him come because Dany is right, _someone_ needs to orgasm. This is why she says, “Babe?” after only a second of waiting.

He is reluctant and scared. This is why he tries to buy time with, “I’m thinking.”

“Do you wanna show me?”

He answers honestly. He says, “No, not really. Not right now at least.”

She is really committed to being fucking bulletproof. She says, “Oh, okay. That’s fine. I understand.” She carefully extracts her damp hand from in between his legs and notes as his tense body just incrementally relaxes.

She throws the blanket off his lap. She slides off his leather couch and lands on the floor with her knees. She is grabbing the waistband of his pants in her fists, pulling hard, trying to get his pants off him. She tells him, “I can figure it out myself.”

He says, “Oh my God,” in a panic as his hands go to his pants, too. He is stopping her from pulling them down. He is saying, “Wait, wait.”

She is saying, “Don’t be shy,” as she tugs roughly on his pants and licks her lips. His pants come down a few inches.

He is letting out this elongated groan-whine, as he frantically tries to think this over. He is trying to quickly weigh out of the pros and cons of letting her go down on him without like, days worth of deep analyzation and planning and acclimating.

He blurts out, “Hey, we are not fluid bonded.”

 

 

  
She stops her assault on his pants so that — yes, yes — they can have a really detailed and overly technical conversation about sex and their relationship. She ends up getting off of the floor and standing up in front of him. He pulls his pants all the way up and also drags his blanket back over his lap. He looks bewildered and also all freaked out over what has just happened.

She kind of feels a little bit weird about this now. He is actually being really guarded and precious about his genitals. She kind of feels like a horny football player with a really hot, really religious prom date — and she just can’t handle hearing no. She punches down these feelings of guilt, as she says, “What do you mean?”

“Fluid bonding is when two people share bodily fluids with each other on the regular —”

“Oh, I know what it means,” she interjects. “I mean, in reference to us.”

With _so much_ nervousness, he tells her that he doesn’t think they should have _that kind_ of sex in that way until they both get checked out by doctors for STIs. He nervously tells her that he’s really not trying to throw up another obstacle to impede like — the progression of their relationship. He’s not trying to be annoying right now. It’s just the responsible thing to do. He mutters, “Sorry.”

She has honestly never even thought about this before. She feels awkward standing in front of him, as he _cowers,_ as she basically reveals _again_ that she’s an idiot with sex and still really inexperienced. She feels awkward telling him that she doesn’t _think_ she has any infections. She’s only ever been sexually active with one other person besides him? And as this comes out of her mouth, she realizes the faulty assumption she is making. She shuts her eyes. She says, “I know. I know. I know it only takes one time and one person to get herpes. But we used condoms.”

Both of them like, really _love_ that they are talking about the details of her past sex life. She remembers — but refrains from admitting that her focus when she was sixteen years old was basically not getting pregnant. So there was an unprotected blowjob or two.

She admits she’s never been tested before. He tells her it’s been probably more than five years for him.

 

 

  
After the incredible moodkiller of a conversation — about safe sex — Grey sighs and asks her what she wants to do now. Maybe they can hold hands. Maybe they can give each other back rubs. Maybe they can high-five each other from opposite ends of the couch.

She asks, “Hand jobs? Is that still on the table?”

He scrunches up his face. He hesitantly says, “I’m not sure.”

“Do you want to text your dad?” she suggests.

“Oh, hell fucking no,” he says. “I do not want to text my father to ask him if he thinks the risk is worth it, for us to stick our hands in each other’s pants. He was actually the one who started this. He was the one who scared the shit out of me with this stuff.”

So the both of them start avidly Googling the answer on their phones. The answer is inconclusive. The consensus is that the risk of passing on an infection is pretty low, but not impossible!

Grey thinks that it must be so rewarding for her to be in a relationship with him, a fucking paranoid psycho.

Missandei thinks that it must be so fun for him to be in a relationship with her, an idiot virgin who doesn’t even know basic shit about sex.

Wearily, she asks him, “Do you wanna go to the grocery store? To buy gloves and more antibacterial hand soap?” It is sort of a joke.

But he says, “Sure.” He says sure because it was only just yesterday that she accused of him not trying hard enough in their relationship. She told him she does all of the heavy-lifting. He says sure because he’s already the fucking tool that keeps stopping sex with his fucking _crying_ and his excessive fear of getting a sex infection. She is awesome and hot and seemingly down to fuck. He says sure because he feels like he needs to make some sort of _gesture_ here.

She is stunned.

 

 

  
Somehow, she thinks it will feel less embarrassing of there is also hummus dip, rice crackers, and cut up vegetables in their cart at this time of night. She lets him push the cart as she trails behind him, looking at nutritional supplements. She lags behind enough to have to trot back up to him in a jog. She wraps her arms around him as she gets on her toes and gives him a kiss against his temple as he stares down rows and rows of condom boxes.

She’s not really sure how and what they are going to use condoms for — to be honest. But she absolutely trusts that he knows what he is doing.

She’s trying not to mess with his concentration by talking. She just stares at product labels like she, too, knows things about sex paraphernalia.

It looks totally random and feels really sudden, when he reaches out, pulls a box off the display, and then drops it into their cart.

“Why that one?”

He says, “Oh. It’s on sale. It’s the best deal. And it’s not lubricated.”

“Um, why is lube bad?”

“It’s not. It’s just the kind that gets prepackaged in condom packets just tastes disgusting.”

She pretty much stops herself from screaming in madness. She stops herself from demanding to know when and how and with whom he earned this information.

Out loud, she says, “Oh, interesting!”

They are staring down lubes next. The selection here happens much faster. He knows what he’s going for right away. He throws the bottle in their cart. He also preemptively explains. He says, “It’s water-based, so it won’t break down the condom. Also, it tastes like close to nothing.”

She says, “Cool, cool.”

They also go over to the first aid section. He throws a box of latex gloves into the cart. He says, “That will actually be handy. I can use those for lots of things. Food prep. Cleaning —”

“And obviously sex, right?” she supplies.

He goes a little rigid. There’s a short pause before he says, “Yes, and obviously sex. With you.”

It’s really fun for the both of them, as a really straight-faced cashier his mom’s age starts ringing up their items, sliding hummus, crackers, veggies, and then an entire suite of sex products over a scanner. The cashier actually gestures to the sex stuff and thoughtfully asks, “Do you want these items to be bagged separately?”

As Missandei’s face combusts into _fire,_ Grey is the first one to say, “Nah, we’re good. Same bag is fine.”

They wish the cashier a good night, as Grey pulls their shit off the counter and follows Missandei, who is pushing their empty cart, out the door.

 

 

  
The mood in the car on the way home is odd. It feels perfunctory, like they are two soldiers marching off to war, now that they are armed with their weapons. Their weapons is just a bunch of latex to protect them from each other’s sex excretions.

Missandei was a lot more confident about this back when he was a cute, scared, shaking little flower who wouldn’t let her take his pants off on his couch. Now he is like, a man. Like, a man with context and history. Like, a man who has had _waaay_ more sex with _waaay_ more people than she has. Like, he has a favorite lube brand.

Quietly, over the rumble of the car, he softly says, “That was a little awkward, huh?”

She says, “Oh my gosh! That was _so awkward!”_

 

 

  
It is past eleven when they get back to his place again. The bag of their stuff is hanging from his fist. He goes to the kitchen to put the food away, after he asks her if she’s hungry and plans on eating right now. She tells him the snacks aren’t for right now, but for later. She actually means it vaguely, like maybe tomorrow, maybe as a light breakfast. But it sounds like she means later as in, _after sex._

The mood is great and a little bit tense and thick, as he nervously says, “Uh, do you want like, try to have some protected sex? Like, with me? Like, right now? I mean — we went through the trouble of getting this stuff. I mean, _no pressure._ We don’t have to do _anything_ just because we bought _stuff._ We can just go to sleep and stuff. That’s also an option.”

Her heart is pounding in her throat. She says, “Sure. Okay.” And then she realizes what she is agreeing to. She immediately corrects. She says, “No, not sure to sleep. I meant, sure to the stuff before it. Sure to like, protected sex. I mean, we can sleep eventually — I’m not saying no to sleep. I’m just mostly saying yes to sex.”

 

 

 


	60. Grey and Missy have terrible sex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missy learn that sometimes sex is not just naturally magical and amazing. Sometimes it is weird and awkward.

  
  
  
  
  


What ensues is foreplay that starts off really mechanically. They awkwardly talk about where the sex should start — maybe back on the couch? Maybe they want to do some more wall stuff? Maybe the bed is for the best, because that is basically what beds are made for. Sleeping. And sometimes eating. Sometimes work. And fucking. 

They settle on the bedroom for the pure convenience factor. 

In the bedroom, Missandei gestures to her body. She asks him if she should take all of her clothes off, some of her clothes off, or maybe none of her clothes off. In the sense that like — maybe he wants take off her clothes for her? Not like she’s a little child who can’t undress herself — she actually means it in a sexy way. Like, sometimes people want to be the one who gets their sex partner naked. Maybe he is one of those people? She is definitely that person. Based on the few times she took off his clothes. 

She says, “It’s like unwrapping a present. For me.”

He is cringing so hard and trying not to show it. He is saying, “Yeah,” really blankly.

It messes with her mind, and she is freaked out that she has said something really wrong and just really weird. And so as a means of distraction, she starts reaching around to unbutton the small little nub at the top of her spine, she says, “You know what? I’m taking off my own clothes — this time around. The future is open, though. Like, you can do it next time. If you want.”

She quickly divests herself of her blouse. Then her bra comes off. Then her pants. And then — fuck it — her panties, too. She is nervously standing stark naked in front of him, as she thinks over how it feels. She doesn’t even like being naked _ by herself, _ so all things considered, the fluttering feeling of anxiety in her belly isn’t  _ that _ terrible. 

He is being really shy about looking at her body. The second her shirt came off, he started averting his eyes. He is being super respectful. It is super fucking cute. However, she is starting to learn that sometimes how  _ fucking cute _ he is being is actually detrimental to sex. When he is being super cute, she just wants to cuddle on him and do a lot of sniffing and a lot of smooching. She is starting to learn that she is the sort of person that really delineates cuteness from hotness. 

She asks him, “Have you ever seen me fully naked before?”

He is avoiding eye contact as he says, “Ah, once. Kind of. It was after your brother got shot.”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “That was a really proud moment for me.” She clears her throat. “I tried to get sexy with you. You pushed me off and were like, ‘What are you  _ doing _ , Missandei! Put your clothes on!’ and I got all embarrassed. And then I tripped and fell down.”

His mouth quirks up into a half smile at that — at the memory of it. His hands start going to his own clothes, his threadbare shirt and his sweatpants, as he says, “Yeah, that was funny. You hit the ground so hard.” 

He feels uncomfortable that he is standing around still dressed, and she is just super  _ naked.  _ The inequity of that bothers him. So even though he’s not really super keen on reliving the horrors of the other night, he tells himself to  _ just fucking do it — holy fucking shit. _

He’s almost all the way undressed — there are just his boxers left — as he catches her face. She is looking at him with such unencumbered encouragement and softness — and it helps. It helps him muster up the guts to pull down his underwear. He steps out of it and immediately kicks it to a far corner of the room, so that he’s not tempted to cover himself back up.  

She is scanning her eyes up and down his body, going from his face all the way to his feet and back up again. He is jittery and paranoid as hell, so to him, it feels like she is just staring the site of his injury the fuck down. He feels like all she cares about or wants to see is his deficiency and his lack of manhood.  

He tells her, “Yeah, it freaks me out so much when you look at me.”

She thinks that he’s talking about his body, period. Not his injury. Her eyes fly back up to his eyes in surprise. She says, “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he says softly. “I just worry that you’re disgusted and you’re judging me.”

“What?” she says softly, as her body immediately goes to him. Her arms come around him. She says, _ “Baby, _ you’re crazy _.” _

“Oh, okay,” he says, kind of sarcastically as he shuts his eyes and accepts her kiss anyway. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei snaps on a pair of gloves even though she really has no plans yet for them. She just does it because it just makes sense to use them, after going through the trouble of buying sex stuff in the middle of the night. 

She looks funny, standing around completely naked with only a pair of latex gloves on. She is giggling as he smiles fondly at her. She is holding up her blue hands, as she says, “I’m ready for sex now.”

She crawls up the bed, following him, as she asks him how it works. She tries to caress his nipple with the gloves on, and it  _ drags _ and there’s a lot of rubbery friction. She says, “Oh, shit — I understand what the lube is for now,” as she leans forward and makes a grab for the bottle on his nightstand. 

Doing so positions her breasts right over his face, and he takes the liberty of latching on with his mouth. His hand also drops to her butt. 

She says,  _ “Gah, _ you’re so good at that.” And then she plucks a pair of gloves from the box for him. She smashes the material into his chest as she extracts her boobs from his lips and his hands. 

She refreshes her right hand with  _ even more _ lube, just lube on top of lube, and basically asks him what happens next. He is sitting in bed, propped against some pillows. He’s trying not to cover his lap with his hands in fright and self-consciousness. He tells her he was afraid of this — he was afraid that he’d have to be her sex-education-for-the-broken-and-the-maimed teacher — because oh God, that is a lot of pressure on him. He winces delicately and vaguely tells her that this can go a number of ways. 

“Like, what ways?”

Honestly, no one he’s ever been with before has ever been so curious and so verbal. Usually he just closes his eyes and basically hopes for the best. 

“Um, we can like, do some touching.”

“Like, what kind of touching?” she asks right away. “Do you mean with our hands? Where? Are you talking about like hand-to-genital contact? Like, do you want to keep doing what we were doing on the couch earlier?”  

He feels like he is being  _ interrogated  _ right now. There’s a really gorgeous naked woman in bed with him — and he’s totally in love with her — and he doesn’t feel sexually aroused like, whatsoever. This is  _ amazing _ .

He says, “Sure, we can keep, uh, doing that.”

She asks, “What are my other options? What else can we do? I’m not saying I don’t want to touch you there. I’m just saying, I want to know what my options are.”

She is also not so much aroused as she is just like, really sweet on him in a warm and romantic kind of way. She can see that he’s freaking out a little bit, but he’s not crying — that’s new! That’s good! She can also see that he’s really uncomfortable being naked around her, but he is not covering himself up, and that is also new! He is being  _ so brave _ , and she  _ admires _ him so much. And she thinks he’s so fucking cute and so fucking amazing. 

She’s going through lube like crazy. And all she is doing is stroking his chest. She has already gone through a third of the bottle — just playing around. He is hesitant to tell her this, because he doesn’t want her to feel self-conscious about it. But the rate in which she is reaching for and squirting lube is kind of alarming. He worries that it’s not going to even last another hour.

She is careful not to straddle him and touch her vagina to his body, because they are not fluid bonded. She just drapes herself against his side and gives him hugs and chaste kisses, as she grasps onto him with gloved hands.

They are both aware this is not going great. It’s not terrible, but not amazing.

She reminds him to put on his gloves. She says, “Click it, or ticket!” because that’s a thing that her dad says a lot. 

She refrains from bringing up her father while in bed with her guy. Like, she’s smart enough for this.

“This is . . . pretty weird,” he tells her, as he picks up the gloves and puts them on his hands. He holds out his hands in a cup so that she can squirt  _ way too much _ lube into it. She does so with a crazed OMG smile. 

“Don’t stigmatize it,” she says, as she rolls a bunch of shiny lube around in her gloved hands, feeling it all slip around pleasantly. “I think it’s  _ sexy. _ It looks like you’re about to do a pelvic examination on me. It looks like you’re about to give me a pap smear. It looks like I should be putting my feet in some stirrups. It looks like we should be making awkward small talk as you poke me hard in the ovaries.” 

He has observed that the quality of her bedroom talk has dropped a little. 

He says, “Um, are you saying you want to roleplay? And you want me to be your OB/GYN?” 

She says, “Oh!” as her eyes widen. That actually was  _ not  _ what she was saying at all. She was just being an idiot goofball because the gloves are a little funny-looking and she is  _ so nervous _ about being bad at this. She clears her throat as she says, “Ah, um, sure! I’m open! Is that what you want to do?” 

She is compulsively trying to be down with everything because she doesn’t want him to feel criticized or unloved or unaccepted. She like, really accepts him. She accepts it all. She is just so in love with him, she will do anything he wants. Even though roleplaying sounds  _ really fucking advanced _ and way beyond her current skill level, it’s totally fine. She is down to learn and try. Much like how she didn’t think she would ever box, she now goes to the gym with Yara like, once a month. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He doesn’t know what the fuck hole they have gone down, but they roleplay a doctor’s visit like, really accurately. He’s had  _ so many _ experiences with doctors because of his injury that the persona comes to him really fast. He like, shakes her hand hello and their gloves slip right past one another. It makes her giggle nervously.

He like, creates a makeshift exam table with a bunch of pillows. She thinks this is normal sex stuff — the commitment to being real method about it — so she pulls at his sheets and throws a flap over her body as she spreads her legs and bends her knees.

She is like, “Do you want to do the breast exam first?”

He is like, “Um, I could?”

Grey legit checks both of her boobs for lumps. In a stunningly true-to-life, accurate way. He does it radially. She is stock still and wondering if it’s like, at all appropriate to ask him how in the world he is so good at breast exams. Is this a natural talent or did his dad like,  _ teach him? _ Why would his dad teach him? Did he ever like, practice on his mom?

Oh.

Gross.

She is clenching up as she rolls through the terribleness that her mind has conjured up. She reminds herself that he is hot and he is naked and they are about to do the sex together, so her brain really needs to shut the fuck up with the incestuous overtones. 

He says to her, “I didn’t feel any lumps. I don’t think you have breast cancer, but truly, we can’t be sure about it without a mammogram. But honestly, you are too young for that.”  

Her voice is tight and high as she says, “Okay, that’s good . . . Doctor Torgo.”

He says, “Oh my God, that’s my dad’s name.” And upon her horrified look, he quickly and needlessly clarifies. With a lot of anxiety pressing down on his hot face, he says, “I mean that’s what his patients and colleagues call him! They’re like, ‘Ah, Doctor Torgo is the best!’ Or they’re like, ‘Is Doctor Torgo there? Can I talk to him, kiddo?’”

She is covering her face with her gloved hands. She is saying, “Oh my God.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They try to recover by having her check him for testicular cancer. They switch roles and, under the sheets, she goes hard for his scrotum again — too hard actually. It’s actually a really delicate area of his body and without a penis as protection, he is more prone to accidental testicular pain from getting smacked in the balls — like what she is doing to him right now. 

He actually gasps. She kind of thinks it’s a sexy gasp — but then he twists his body away from hers, covers himself up with his hands, and he says, “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” He means that he’s sorry for being  _ so attractive _ and  _ so sexy  _ just all the fucking  _ time _ .

And then she is like, also horrified. Because she realizes she has maimed him. Her jaw drops. She exclaims, “No!  _ I’m _ sorry! Grey! Are you okay!”

“Uh, yeah,” he says, breathing through it. “Yeah! I’m okay!”

It sounds totally unconvincing.

She is then mega-scared about touching that area of his body again. She tries to transition out of this portion of the cancer screening smoothly, by pointing at him with a gloved finger and saying, “Should I check your prostate now?”

He straight up says, “Oh my God, no.”

Which actually hurts her feelings a little bit, even though she completely cannot blame him for saying no. She is just really fucking  _ terrible  _ at this. 

_ Then,  _ they both just let him touch her vagina again. 

It’s not at all like it was the other night. It feels clinical and she is nervous-laughing at him. It sounds syncopated and repetitive. She keeps saying, “Oh man, oh man, oh mannn,” and is blinking forcefully, as he experimentally tries to insert a finger into her.

It does not happen because she is not aroused enough. It is really dry. They both realize this in a panic. They both have no idea where to go next. She’s still so afraid of offending him and hurting his feelings — so she is responding by going rigid underneath his touch and just bracing for dear life. 

She is also  _ bitching out _ her vagina in her head, mentally screaming at it and wondering what the fuck its problem is. She kind of continues to nervously laugh because maybe it will dispel some of the awkwardness — and this kind of reminds her of a real visit to the doctor. The last time she was at the doctor’s office for a real pap, her doctor asked her to “relax” because her doctor had a real hard time getting in there. Missy meekly said, “I’m trying to?” And then to the MA, her doctor had said, “Can I get more lube please?” as Missy just twiddled her thumbs and stayed flat on an exam table just going _ , fuck my life, fuck my life, fuck my life!  _

“Maybe just try pushing harder?” she suggests. “Maybe we need more lube?”

“Um, we _ don’t  _ fucking need more lube, babe,” he says, because more than half the fucking bottle is just  _ gone,  _ and his sheets are a fucking wet mess. He is grimacing as he says, “I don’t think I should force it.”

“No, it’s okay. Just push harder.”

He says her name. He says, “Missandei,” as he reluctantly complies.

Okay, it hurts. Fuck. It hurts.  _ Great. _

He can feel her body tense and seize up. Which is great because now he feels like he just assaulting her. 

He stops. He says, “Ah, we should stop.”

“No!” she says, whining into his arm. “I don’t want to stop! Keep going!”

“Babe,” he says, his voice low and very enunciated. “I’m just gonna say it. I’m just gonna put it out there. I don’t think sex is going well for us.”

  
  
  
  
  


She takes her gloves off her sweaty hands, throws them onto the ground, and then rolls over to scream into his pillow. She is screaming, “What the  _ fuccck!” _ and punching his mattress in disbelief as his hand — his bare hand — smoothly runs over her back, sneaking under her hair to massage her neck. 

During a lull in her really dramatic screaming, he says, “Do we have to break up now?”

It’s a joke. But it’s a really badly timed joke. She starts tearing up. And then she starts crying a little bit, at the very thought. 

His face also crumples a little bit. He says, “Babe —” as he reaches out for her.

Still crying, she roughly pushes him away, and she hysterically shouts, “Don’t comfort me! Don’t make me feel better about being ridiculous! I know you were joking!”

He sighs in response. He takes his hand away. He wriggles deeper underneath the covers, and he puts his arms behind his head. He is staring up at the ceiling. He is also cracking another dark joke, as he tells her, “I like how one of us always ends up in tears whenever we get intimate with each other.” Then he says, “Come here.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


When they wake up, they find that they are both naked under the covers and that is a real trip. She lifts up the duvet cover and his comforter, looks at their darkened nude bodies lying side by side, and she lets out an other crazy-sounding giggle.  

Grey, who has been awake for fifteen minutes and dreading the entire day ahead of him, really wishes she would stop laughing like that. It sounds like tittering. Like, a birdlike warble. It sounds panicked and also chock full of psychosis. He is already anxious. It makes him feel like she is laughing at his absent dick — even though he knows that’s not what is happening. But what is even the point in constantly laughing whenever things get awkwardly intimate?

She is actually laughing as a brainless way of lightening the mood. She is trying not to let it get too tense and too heavy. She is trying to stop the both of them from crying all the time. She figures that if they are relaxed and happy, then stuff will just fall into place. 

The floor is a graveyard of latex gloves and their clothes from last night. 

Missandei ends up really carefully planning out her next move. She really, really needs to pee. The nearest article of clothing are her slacks. Her shirt and bra are clear across the room. She can be super weird about this and slink over there on her hands and knees and quickly dress herself before she makes it to the bathroom.

Or she can just fucking deal with this and be naked in the daytime with him looking at her. 

She opts for the latter, because it seems like the kindest route to go. She bombastically grabs the edge of his comforter and flips it right off her body.

Grey is like, “What the!” in surprise, as a flap hits him in the face and a whoosh of air hits the side of his naked body. 

She tells him, “I need to pee,” as she casually stands up and walks what she thinks is a super normal pace to the bathroom.

To him, it looks strangely stilted and slow, like she is hurt or sore somewhere. He says, “Babe, are you okay? Are you limping?”   


“I’m totally fine!” she says quickly, as she slides through the bathroom door and then shuts it behind her. 

Once in there, she realizes that she didn’t plan this out great. She is also going to have to leave the bathroom naked.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After she flushes the toilet, she washes her hands, splashes water on her face, brushes her teeth, pulls off her scarf, and refreshes her hair a little bit with a conditioning spray. She stares at her naked body and face in the mirror and just starts really scrutinizing everything. She realizes that she is stressing about looking cute enough. For him. Nakedly.  

She looks down at her crotch — kind of stunned that she’s completely naked as hell right now. She kind of swipes off some imaginary dust or lint off of her hair down there. And then she takes in a soul-fortifying breath and opens the bathroom door 

He is gone. The bed was hastily made and all of their clothes was picked up — hers are arranged neatly at the foot of the bed. The sex gloves are all gone.

She quickly dresses herself back into her clothes. The smell of coffee wafts underneath her nose, so she understands where he went. And then she cautiously but also super casually in a totally non-premeditated way, walks out of the bedroom and is like, “Hey, baby! Is that coffee I smell!”

He actually recoils a little bit — at the pep in her tone.  

He’s still shirtless, but his pants are firmly back on. He’s at the stove, trying to heat up some soup in a pan. 

She nudges her butt onto a stool as she says, “So, what’s the plan for today?”

“Ah, I have to go over to my folks to check out this weird smell that is coming out of their vents. They mentioned it to me last night. I think an animal died.”

She says, “Oh.”

He’s holding out a mug of coffee to her. He says, “What about you? What do you have going on?”

She grabs the mug with both hands gratefully. She smiles at him. She says, “No plans.”

He gives her a really flat, really steady expression as he says, “You wanna hunt for a dead animal with me, then?”

But his eyes are lit up — they are bright and amused — and it makes her pulse jump in her neck. She smiles back at him, all gushy and adoringly. 

She enthusiastically says, “Yes! Let’s do it!”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	61. Grey kills rats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey teaches Missy how to murder. She gets a little annoyed at her father-in-law figure and doesn't think he's as hilarious as he thinks he is. Then she and Grey find that there is an incarnation of him that is disgusting to her. Grey thinks the love of his life is a princess sometimes. Missy thinks the love of her life is a stubborn asshole sometimes. And then some real-talk happens in the shower.

 

 

 

She doesn’t know why her original assumption was that dead animal hunting would be fun, romantic, and fast. It is none of those things.

They spend time at the home improvement store buying drywall, steel mesh, hardening foam spray, rodent poison, and snap traps. She understands that he is sealing the house, but she also dumbly asks him why he is buying poison and traps for what is probably a dead rat. He slowly explains to her that rats live in colonies. He tries to explain it in a way that doesn’t sound patronizing, with mixed results. He tells her that one dead rat is representative of a bunch of alive rats, hiding somewhere in the house.

She shivers over this information. She tells him that she’s thinking about rats crawling all over her body, and it creeps her out. She tells him she doesn’t do well with possums either. She might have a weird and specific vermin phobia.

She also asks him if they really have to kill the rats. She asks if there is a more humane way of doing this. She hopefully asks, “Can’t we just trap them in a box and then free them in the woods?”

As he reads over packaging and avidly swipes the screen of his phone, He simply says, “No. We can’t do that.” Then he dumps the box of poison in his cart and walks off.

She trots after him and the metal cart, asking, “Why not?”

“It’s not effective,” he mumbles, trying half-heartedly to throw his voice behind him, only paying half-attention to what he is saying. “The time that it takes for us to try an ineffective idea will allow the rats to breed like crazy and then, rather than engaging in a rat massacre, we will end up carrying out a rat genocide. We have to kill a few right now in order to not end up killing dozens.”

She hates this. She is generally a pacifist. She is creeped out by rats, but she still likes animals and think they have a right to life. They just want to be in someplace warm and cozy. They just want to eat well. They have been displaced from by urbanization and sprawl. Humans are totally the white people of the animal kingdom. She is frowning at Grey with this context in her brain and saying, “You make it sound so noble.”

He is pushing the cart toward checkout as he drawls, “Just wait until a trap doesn’t snap the neck of a rat.”

She pauses, blinking rapidly. And then she leans forward to touch his shoulder. She says, “What happens then?”

He doesn’t answer her — on purpose.

“What _happens then?_ ” she repeats.

 

 

  
She greets Grey’s dad with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. When his dad asks her why she’s always hanging around his kid when his kid is doing the boringest shit ever, Missandei just bashfully says she’s kind of obsessed with his kid and is being a clingy woman today. Grey is embarrassed by this statement — beyond just the affection of it. He is remembering how he was hysterical and cried to his mommy and daddy because he was worried that his girl wouldn’t love him anymore because she saw him be vulnerable as hell and _vulnerability is disgusting._ He feels stupid about getting so emotional about everything, so he avoids his dad’s face because he doesn’t want to fucking see any I-told-you-so-you-idiot looks. Grey just pretends he didn’t hear any of this. He just walks back to the car to retrieve more things.

As Grey leaves, Missandei also tells his dad that she didn’t realize that Grey is so knowledgeable and great at killing living things, what the hell?

“He gets it from me,” his dad says in a deadpan. And, upon her blank and patient look — she understands the joke, she just thinks it’s sad and kind of horrifying — he needlessly explains the joke to her. He says, “A lot of people have died around me, sometimes as a direct consequence of something I did.”

Grey kind of chuckles as he walks back into the house, holding an armful of building materials, poison, and traps. “Okay, Dr. Kevorkian.”

“Nudho, don’t even get me fucking started,” his dad warningly says, in a joking way.

Grey is grinning at his dad widely and openly. She thinks it is so freaking adorable. She also completely doesn’t understand this inside joke at all.

Grey’s dad then looks her up and and down, still wearing her work clothes. He tells her that she’s really not dressed for murder. This innocuous comment kind of causes her flashback to last night, with her and his son naked and roleplaying doctor and patient. Specifically, it makes her flashback to the moment she carelessly called Grey by his dad’s title and name.

The embarrassment of the memory causes her to be forcefully quiet.

Grey’s dad interprets it as disapproval or a lack of humor. He says to her, “I’m joking, honey. No one is basking in this. It’s actually a huge pain in the fucking ass. The house is starting to smell like weird shit.”

Grey’s dad ends up showing his son where he thinks the smell is emanating from — from the office-slash-study area — the room where they used to keep a fat monitor and desktop for the boys’ homework and kind-of-furtive porn-browsing on Azzie’s part. Now, it just houses ancient exercise machines — a treadmill and a stationary bike — as well as a newer desktop, and a corner desk.

Grey gets on his hands and knees and starts smelling the wall, where his dad is pointing. He is saying, “I dunno, Dad,” until his nose hits the spot. Then he is like, “Whoa, okay, just kidding. You’re right.”

“No shit, I am right. Do you think I don’t know how to _smell?”_

She is standing next to his dad because she’s too shy to sit in the office chair, even though he told her to relax and take a load off. Her arms are crossed over her chest as she watches Grey cut into the wall with a saw. And though she is talking to Grey she is really directing the conversation at his dad. She says, “How do you know how to do all of these things?”

Predictably, his dad answers for him. His dad says, “I’m really cheap even though I’m rich as hell. I don’t like paying for people to do this shit when I can do it myself. The boys have been digging ditches for sprinkler systems and winterizing the house since they were little.”

“He likes to treat me like his own personal slave,” Grey mutters, pulling the saw out to change the angle before he stabs it back into the wall.

His dad asks her, “Don’t your brothers help your parents around the house?”

“Well, _yeah,”_ she says. “But not like, happily. They complain a lot when they have to help.”

“I’m not happy,” Grey mumbles, but he is smiling. So the effect of his words is totally bogus.

When Grey opens the wall and peeks in with a flashlight — she and his dad are waiting with bated breath — and they see his shoulders slump in what looks like disappointment. Then he defies expectations by saying, “Yeah, there’s totally a dead, decomposing rat here.”

His delivery of this information is so strange that she blurts, “What? Are you serious?”

“Yeah, man. I’m looking right at it. I’ll show you in a second.”

As Grey shifts his weight around a little bit, wincing at the sight of the rat and the smell, his dad gets struck by a memory of his kid being young, vulnerable, and injured. So he randomly freaks out on Grey and yells at him. “Put some fucking gloves on! Don’t fucking touch a dead rat with your bare hands, dumbass!”

Grey is like, “Um, I wasn’t going to?”

Grey ends up rustling the canvas bag of stuff that he brought from home. He pulls out a pair of blue latex gloves from a plastic zip bag and snaps them on his hands. Still facing the wall, he casually says to her, “I told you these were a good buy, Miss. I told you I’d get a lot of use out of them.”

She can only see the back of his head, but she knows he is smiling.

And she is like, blushing _so hard what the fuck._

She ends up trying to cover up her embarrassment by spastically talking over it. She loudly clears her throat and says, “You sure told me!” as she does a jaunty swing of her fist. She is not looking at his dad, but can see him look at her in mild confusion, in her peripheral vision. She quickly says, “Babe! How decomposed is that rat! I’ve never seen a dead rat in a wall before!”

“Oh my God, so fucking cheerful,” his dad says. “Son, your woman really wants to see this carcass. Hurry up now.”

There’s plastic laid down next to Grey, next to his knees. There’s a grocery store bag next to that. And then before she knows it, Grey just plops the body of a strikingly large rat onto the the plastic. It is furry and looks like it is sleeping. It also definitely looks dead. Its mouth is open.

And then her eyes go wide. And then her jaw drops. And then — surprising her own self — she let’s out this high-pitched, elongated gasp-scream. She just starts wailing.

 

 

  
His mom comes home from her volunteering just about when Missandei is led into the kitchen by his dad with his hand guiding her by the shoulder blades. He has her sit down as he gets her a glass of water, convinced that a glass of water will make her feel better.

She obediently takes big gulps as her heart pounds rapidly. Her eyes are dry — she didn’t cry — but she did make it massively distracting for Grey to work with the fearful shrieking. He is still in the office cutting out more wall and disinfecting stuff with an enzyme cleaner.

Grey’s mom is still her coat. She calmly asks, “What is going on?”

Grey’s dad is trying not to crack up. He is trying to be sensitive and take this shit seriously. His shoulders are bouncing up and down from contained laughter, as he says, “Um, Grey found a dead rat in our wall. And Missy, um, did not respond well to the sight of it.”

“Oh,” his mom says carefully. “I see.” Then she needlessly adds, “Sweetheart, if you don’t like looking at dead rats, you know that you don’t have to, right?”

Oh, cool. So this is where he gets this shit from.

 

 

  
She completely ends being the boob of the day. She ends up the butt of every comment about rats. They are not even making jokes. They are just reliving her screaming, repetitively retelling the story of what happened out loud, cracking themselves up over it. Grey’s dad keeps marvelling over how severe the reaction was, compared to what was actually happening. Like, she got plenty of warning. Like, Grey repeatedly told them that there was a dead rat, that he was looking at a dead rat. Like, she knew that the goal of the day was to extract a dead animal from the wall.

And yet, she still just started screaming.

She is trying to laugh along with them, but her amusement rings hollow. She is embarrassed because this family is full of ridiculous pragmatists — and Azzie. And she was caught being excessively emotional. She is Azzie.

She tries to go back and watch Grey lay out traps inside the house and lay poison outside of the house. She is so past the concept of animal murder now.

But his dad stops her and asks, “Are you sure you can handle this?” with his eyes twinkling. She can tell he is joking around. But she is frustrated with him — for the first time since meeting him. She is frustrated by how hard he holds onto ideas. And she is trying to be really cool and trying not to snap at him like how Grey sometimes does, proving all of his dad’s suspicions about her melodramatic tendencies right. She understands Grey’s occasional frustration with his dad better now.

She just psychotically plasters a smile to her face and says, “I’m sure!”

And his dad is like, “Okay, but just remember to avert your eyes if he tells you he has stumbled upon another dead animal.”

During a snack break, Grey takes off his gloves so that he can unhinge his jaw and hork down a beef sandwich that his mom bought on her way home. He has been crawling around in the crawl space underneath the house, looking for rat nests. He has plainly told them there are a few piles of rat shit down there.

That is what she thinks about as she watches him inhale his sandwich. She thinks that he is so fucking dirty right now — not in the sexy way — and he will have to shower for a long time and disinfect himself before she will cuddle with him again. All she can currently see is invisible rat poop, all over him. She is also kind of grossed out by how closely he’s been handling poison and how closely he’s been around rat poop and a rat corpse — yet he manages to be unfazed and is eating a whole bunch of gluten and a slice of dairy.

“Sorry I didn’t get anything for you, honey,” Grey’s mom says again. “I just didn’t realize we’d be seeing you today.”

Missy is working on another glass of water and is munching politely on rice crackers even though she’s not that hungry. His mom just feels really guilty over this sandwich slight. Missy says, “Oh, it’s totally fine, Sanaa. It’s not a big deal at all.”

“I can’t imagine this one has much of an appetite after the ordeal she has gone through,” Grey’s dad says. “It’s been a trying day for her.”

Missy has a smile still plastered to her face as Grey chuckles a little bit. She is honestly so over this.

 

 

  
She is surprised that he’s not showering at his parents’ house — but honestly, why would he? Nonetheless, she pauses and stares at him when it’s time to go home. He grabs her car keys. He gives his mom a kiss on the cheek and his dad a pat on the back. No one is hugging him because they realize he is filthy and disgusting right now. And then he looks at her expectantly, like, hey, let’s go now.

Missandei is staring at him dumbly.

He says, “Oh, do you want to drive instead?”

She is trying to be real cool as she says, “Yeah,” taking the keys from him.

She says goodbye to his folks with hugs and kisses. His dad makes another comment about her shrieking. She stops herself from being a dick and trying to make him feel bad by telling him that she is not yet jaded and cannot yet look at the end of life like, oh whatever. She still thinks that it is like, _crazy_ when things die. She still has a visceral response to it. She is not like them in this respect. She still gets upset by death.

Out loud, she just says, “It’s good to see you guys! Love ya!”

On the way out of the car, she’s determined to be committed to keeping up appearances until Grey showers and is normal again, but his voice is low and deliberate, as he touches the passenger side door handle and says, “You are so pissed right now.”

She looks at him through window glass in surprise.

He is smiling at her.

 

 

  
In the car, on the way back to his apartment, she tells him straight up that he is so disgusting and she doesn’t want to touch him until he is clean again. The words initially cut the shit through his heart because of how they sound, but he quickly recovers. He tells her that she’s being a bit of a princess about this. He tells her that he didn’t like, smear rat shit all over his body. He was like, wearing gloves and a face mask as he cleaned things up?

She tells him that molecules float in air — trying to be kind of scientific about it, trying to appeal to his the way his mind works.

He is like, “Oh, _okay,”_ kind of derisively, as he refrains from arguing this point with her. Instead, he opts to tell her that she is surprising him today. He says, “I didn’t realize how —” He is pausing because he’s trying to find the right word. He really wants to tell her that she’s such a fucking girl and it is surprising him how much of a girl she is — but he knows she will not respond well to this because it sounds mad sexist. He says, “I thought I was the clean freak, of the two of us. But you are a whole other level right now.”

“It’s not about being clean,” she says as she drives — just counterintuitively flying the face of everything she has said thus far. “It just gives me the heebie jeebies. Like, you’re sitting in my car seat right now.”

“Are you serious?” he says. “Do you want me to clean your car seat when we get back to my place, so that it’s not infected by imagined rat dropping molecules?”

“No,” she says in agitation. “I’ll just Febreeze it later.”

 

 

  
He purposely doesn’t hop into the shower right away, when they get back to his place. He doesn’t think she should get rewarded for being a real priss who did not help him at all in the grim task of rat murder. He thinks it’s annoying that she is being a bit conditional about intimacy. Like, her hard line is rat shit. That’s good to know. But it’s also ridiculous because there’s _no rat shit on him._ There is just insulation and dust and a little bit of dirt.

He peels off his sweatshirt, revealing a white t-shirt underneath. He smells his shirt and it still smells cotton-y and like laundry detergent. He deposits his sweatshirt in the laundry basket before he comes back out to the kitchen to grab a home brew from the fridge. He cracks the bottle of IPA open, and then takes it over to his couch before he sits down. She has been watching him intently from her standing position, right in front of the TV. Her arms are crossed. And there’s probably a documentary about a serial killer that he can really get into for a couple of hours.

She says, “You’re really not showering? You’re really taking a stand on this?”

He is like, “Yep. You’re being ridiculous.”

 _“You’re_ being ridiculous!” she corrects.

“No, _you_ are,” he says. “Can you move? You are blocking the TV.”

“You’re being an asshole,” she hisses.

“I’m really not,” he volleys back, taking a sip of his beer. And here, he belatedly realizes what this looks like. He is refusing to shower even though she wants him to. And he is sitting on the couch with a bottle of gluten. It _really does_ looks like he is trying to stick it to her. He honestly just wants to reward himself with a beer because his favorite Saturday activity is not rat-murdering.

So his tone softens. He says, “Babe —”

And she cuts him off — just to say, “I’m going to go home if you don’t shower.”

Oh, shit. So he doesn’t do well with threats or these kinds of declarative statements. So all of the goodwill he has summoned up just gets sucked down a drain. He is like, “Okay. I can’t stop you from doing what you want to do. So if you want to go home, I’ll see you later.”

“Are you _serious?”_ she says, with her eyes wide. “Grey!”

“Missandei!” he says back to her, his voice getting louder now, too. “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I don’t want to shower right now. You are being . . . demanding right now, and I don’t like it. I just want to relax for a second and not just do _everything_ you want me to do _right when_ you want me to do it. I already get enough of that with my dad. And hello? When was the last time you showered? You are wearing your clothes from yesterday, but am I calling you disgusting and telling you I won’t touch you unless you clean yourself up? No. Because that is kind of mean.”

“Okay,” she says, seething now. “I am wearing my clothes again because I have _no clothes_ here. I am just a visitor in your home, so I can’t clean myself up even if I wanted to.”

“Oh, shit,” he mutters, trying to see _around_ her. He _really_ has found a documentary on serial killers and is trying to watch it. “Miss, if you want to bring some of your shit over, that’s cool. I have lots of space in my closet.”

“What, huh? Are you serious?”

“Jesus, can you move?” he says, swatting at air, gesturing at her to — _seriously_ — get the fuck out of the way. “And _yeah._ I didn’t realize. Just bring some clothes over. Then you don’t have to stand around being all disgusting and unwashed all the time.”

 

 

  
She ends up sitting down on his couch so that he can watch his program. She watches him for signs that he is doing this to fuck with her, but all she sees is him attentively watching the documentary and taking sips from his beer.

So, assuming good intentions — which is really not her usual MO — she tells herself that he really _isn’t_ punishing her. He really just wants to chill. And he does have a point about the both of them being ripe. And he also just told her that it’s okay with him, for her to have more space in his life.

So she lies down. She lies down on her side and slides her bare feet into his lap. It’s okay for her feet to be near imagined rat droppings. She smushes a pillow under her head as he throws his blanket from Braavos over her body. She feels his warm hand come down on her ankle. And then she is like, oh damn, as he starts pressing a thumb into her arch.

 

 

  
They both end up completely engrossed by the documentary. It steals nearly three hours of their day. He stays awake for the entire thing. She gets hungry in the midst of it, but ignores her growling stomach so that they don’t have to pause it.

The mood is a little heavy once the end credits roll, because they are both kind of sad and unsettled by real psychopathy and violent crimes against women.

He stands up, knocking her feet off his lap, and he starts gathering the empty beer bottles on his coffee table. He takes them to his sink before he walks back to the living room area. He stands in front of her and says, “So, uh, I’m going to go shower now.”

She sits up. She says, “I’ll join you.”

 

 

  
He doesn’t know if she plans for them to go for another round of sex. But he tries to explain to her that the documentary really like, bummed him the fuck out. So he doesn’t really want to have sex right now.

He actually just ends up saying it straight up. He says, “I don’t want to have sex right now.”

She says, “Good, me neither.”

He clears his throat as he turns on the faucet in the shower and quickly divests himself of his clothes. She does the same. He gathers it all up in a bundle and dumps it all into his laundry basket.

They are both naked. The lights in his bathroom are cool and bright — he uses daylight bulbs because he thought that was smart at one point. He just didn’t anticipate that he’d be standing around naked with her like this — and that it would be so mundane and easy to see everything with daylight bulbs.

She laughs, a little uneasily — because he is just so reluctant to look at her body, and it makes her feel a certain way. Self-conscious. Scared. Nervous. She lightly tells him, “One day soon, this will feel normal.”

He helps her into the shower stall with both of his hands grasping hers. He tells her that there’s a step even though she sees it. He turns around and fiddles with the faucet and asks her if the water is too hot for her. It’s really bright in his bathroom, so she sees water carving its way down his back in morphing rivers and streams. She looks down and sees water flowing down his butt, over it, and in between the valley of his cheeks.

Her face gets a little hotter and her heart pounds harder, as she stupidly and belatedly realizes that this is really intimate.

She can’t even kiss him right now because he is made a mess of his mouth with beer and sandwiches.

He looks kind of tense and a little miserable as he turns around. He is blocking the water, except for the errant spray that occasionally hits her right in the eyeballs.

She lays her hands on his shoulders.

His voice echoes as he says, “Oh, so now it’s okay to touch me? I haven’t even soaped up yet.”

And in response to _this,_ well, she just ignores it. Instead, she says, “Where do you see us going? We’ve been together for a while now. Like, where do you see this relationship going?”

 

 

 


	62. Missy and Grey shower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missy have a relationship talk in the shower. He tells her why he hates marriage and God so much. She takes it well — to his utter surprise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am posting this chap up fast because I wanted to tell you guys that there's a podfic version of this ficccc by kalipersephone. [Check it out here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582885/chapters/41443676)

 

 

He doesn’t know exactly what she is asking at first even though her question is pretty straightforward and intuitive. He’s just so freaked out by the implication that he automatically convinces himself that he could’ve misheard her and is just making up shit in his head. He tells himself that she might not have really meant to ask him if they were like — if this was like, long term. She probably meant something else.

He tries and gets some clarity — nervously. He actually asks, “Um, can you clarify what you just asked?” because he doesn’t like making assumptions. He doesn’t like being presumptuous, just in case it makes him look like a complete ass.

She is blinking against the spray of the water. Her heart is also pounding really hard. She is already bracing herself for his freakout. She has been sort of trying to prime him for this, by dropping comments here and there about how she’s obsessed with him. But there’s probably not really enough prep that can be done for something like this. She just has to risk him screaming into her face before he runs the fuck away.

So she says to him, “I love you.” And then she also says, “And I know you are not into marriage.”

He feels a weight drop into his gut. It’s his worst fear come alive. All of the terrible conversations he’s had with her parents replay in head. And all he can say is, “Yeah.”

She says, “Your parents are married though.”

He winces. He says, “Actually, they are not.”

“What?” The question is open and curious, not judgemental.

“They actually aren’t,” he explains. “People just assume they are. But legally, they aren’t married.”

“Is your mom’s name not Mrs. Torgo?”

He makes this face — like he is being tortured and he feels reluctant about it. It is giving her a real complex. He says, “Ah, it is not.”

“Grey,” she says patiently. “Have I been making the wrong assumption about your mom?”

Nervously, he says, “That she’s not a big ol’ whore? Yeah, you’ve been making the wrong assumption about her.” And then he shuts his eyes. He was trying to be funny to alleviate his anxiety, but now he just feels sort of terrible about calling his mom a whore. It’s just — his dad makes these jokes all the time. He clears his throat. “Yeah, sorry,” he says. “They don’t care. They don’t bother correcting people anymore.” And as an afterthought, he says, “Isn’t it funny how no one would call my dad a big ol’ whore? Double standards, am I right?”

Missy completely bypasses all of his distracting traps. She stays focused. She asks, “Why aren’t your parents married, Grey?”

His initial response is to shrug. Because while he used to occasionally field this question when he was a little kid, it was never a big deal. A lot of his friends were raised by single mothers themselves, so they all got having a mom with a different last name.

He is shrugging because this is a not a big talking point in his family at all. And he forgot that it might be a significant thing to other people. He is shrugging because he awkwardly feels like maybe he accidentally hid something from her and acted like it was a secret — when really, it was just negligence.

He says, “Ah, you should ask my mom. Maybe I shouldn’t be talking for her.”

She patiently says, “Babe, can you please open your mouth and just tell me what you know? Your mom is actually not here for me to ask.”

“It would be mad weird if she were here. Because we’re in the shower naked right now.”

_“Grey.”_

He shrugs. He feels dumb over this story already — for reasons he doesn’t yet understand. It’s not like he even plays a part in it. He didn’t exist when his parents were going through their hard shit.

He mutters, “I dunno exactly,” as he grabs his bar of fancy oatmeal and lavender soap and starts lathering up. He thinks that if he has something to do, then it will calm his mind down some.

“Grey,” she says. “You’re freaking me out. You’re making me feel like you’re about to tell me something horrific about your parents, like they are actually brother and sister, and that’s the reason they didn’t get married.”

He automatically says, “Oh _gross._ No, man. My parents are totally not brother and sister. I am not the product of incest. _Gross,_ Missandei.”

_“Grey!”_

So he sighs and gets kind of academic about it. He soaps up his body as he tells her that the slave trade brought Western religion with it and people converted on a wide scale in order to like, survive — and that like, cemented like, patriarchy in the culture.

He looks into Missandei’s face and basically waits for her to snap at him and tell him that she already knows this shit — because the same thing happened to her people. But actually, her face is open and attentive. God, she kills him with this shit all the time — with her emotional investment in him and her support of him.

So he tells her that Western religion mixed with the local, indigenous culture, which is real sexually open and stuff. The result of the convergence, over the generations, is a complex culture of double standards. He tells her that he realizes that his nervous rambling is going nowhere and that this is just way too much context for a simple freaking question.

She tells him she’s starting to understand more, why he does not believe in God.

He tells her that it’s pretty normal for men in the Summer Isles to have multiple wives, or a wife, a mistress, and a bunch of girlfriends. The case is not the same for women, obviously.

He tells her that his mom was a real slut in her youth — which actually means she was rebellious and had boyfriends she was sexually active with. She wanted to get educated and stuff, even though everyone around her just wanted her to get married. She was from a really respectable family, too. Her dad was like, a big-deal community elder who wanted to marry her off, which was really hard because she was not a virgin, and men do not want to marry women like her. They were trying to force her to do some reconstructive surgery on her hymen to like, revirginized her. But she was an asshole and fucked with their plans by getting pregnant by one of her boyfriends. It’s really hard to revirginize a pregnant woman.

That boyfriend was Grey’s dad. This is why his grandpa, when he was alive, really hated Grey’s dad. It got worse when Grey’s dad, who was very determined to leave the Isles, took their daughter with him. She was pregnant with Grey at the time. Her father wanted to keep Azzie and make him stay behind to be raised by the family. Their mom really didn’t want that, so she left without saying a word.

Grey tells Missandei that this is why they didn’t see much of his mom’s side of the family when they visited the Summer Isles. He and Azzie are physical evidence of how their mom turned her back on her family.

He says, “This is why my parents aren’t married. My mom doesn’t want to be married. She never wanted to be married.”

He tells her that, as for him, his reasons for not wanting to get married aren’t his mom’s reasons. Like, that shit was crazy, and he’s lucky that he doesn’t have those kind of problems in life. His deal is just that his parents aren’t married, and they really love each other. When he was really little and asked them why they weren’t married, they didn’t tell him the horrifying truth right away and they didn’t explain hymen reconstruction surgery to him — that stuff came later. They just told him they love each other, and they want to wake up every day choosing to be with each other. They told him that his mom is his mom and his dad is his dad, no matter what.

“And then I learned about the hymen thing when I was like, thirteen, and I was like, holy shit, that sucks, Mom. And so yeah, man. That just gave me some real negative associations with marriage. I’m really not into it. I don’t see the point of it at all. I think it’s something archaic designed to keep people down and oppressed, just like religion. And so, all that to ask — Missandei, are you really into marriage? Is this a dealbreaker? Are we about to break up?”  
  
She slams her hands against his chest and shoves him into the wall — because she fucking hates this joke. She shouts, “I hate that joke! It makes me sad! Can we just stop making it!”

He is so shocked that she shoved him — that she could’ve killed him because he totally could’ve slipped on soap and fallen. He is so shocked that he drops his intense anxiety over this conversation, grasps at the tile wall frantically, and just releases this laugh that starts out bewildered but then becomes real.

It feels so good to laugh. It feels like such a relief.

He confesses to her pissed off face that he is looking forward to the day when the both of them aren’t scared about losing each other over the things they don’t yet know about each other. He says, “So, are you telling me this is not a dealbreaker for you?”

She shakes her head. She says, “I fucking love you so much.”

He says, “I know.” He’s shaking his head, too.

“Hey!” she says, snapping her fingers in his face, making him jolt. “I know you’re all in your feelings right now, but you should know that when I tell you I love you and you say, ‘I know,’ instead of ‘I love you, too,’ you sound like an asshole.”

He laughs delightedly at that. The laughing is becoming easier and easier. He says, “Oh, shit! You told me! Sorry, Miss. I didn’t realize I was doing that so much. I love you, too. Of course I love you, too.”

She gives him another shove, this one much gentler and more affectionate. She holds onto the tail end of it, her hands grasping his shoulders. She cuddles against him, getting hit in the face with some water before she pivots her head. She presses their wet bodies together. She says, “Yeah, you _better.”_

He starts absently soaping up her back, because he realizes this woman isn’t getting clean _at all._ He runs his palms up and down the curve of her spine and her rib cage as he mutters, “So lack of dick, not a dealbreaker. Hatred of God, not a dealbreaker. Hatred of marriage, not a dealbreaker. Holy shit, we’re almost in the clear.” His hands then pause on her hips. He then has this crazy, radical, probably stupid idea. He quickly says, “Let’s just get it all out. Let’s just say what our dealbreakers are right now. And just deal with it right now. I’ll go first. I have none, baby. You are literally the most perfect person on the planet to me and _fuck me,_ I never wanted to say this to you out loud because your ego is already _immense,_ Missandei.”

He learns that in the shower, it’s kind of hard to tell if she is crying or if it’s just the shower. There’s already water all over her face.

She sucks in a sharp intake of breath. It is actually obvious that she is crying. He is just trying to steel himself for what she is about to say.

She tells him, “I just have one.”

“Fuck,” he says, grunting. He resumes soaping her up. He says, “What _is it?_ Is it manly crying? How much is too much?” He is trying to lighten the mood as he is _panicking_ inside.

“Grey,” she says, impatiently.

“Sorry,” he says, right away.

So they end up staying in the shower until their fingers are prunes and the water starts running cold. They end up letting him wash her frontside with a lot of disbelief and a lot of immature giggling. They end up letting him go really rigid and tense as she cleans him in between his legs. She tells him that he has to get used to this at some point, because it sounds like she’s going to be around to do this kind of stuff with him for a while. He tries to laugh. He tells her he’s a work in progress.

They stay in there talking for a long, long time. She cautiously thanks him for telling her the truth and thanks him for explaining to her why he feels the way he feels. She tells him she honestly had no idea why he was anti-marriage. She thought it meant he was anti-commitment maybe — when she was at her most insecure. She is always afraid of smothering him and driving him away with how much she cares about him. So she was afraid his deal with marriage was related to that. She was afraid she was going to have to play it cool for their entire relationship, so that he doesn't get skittish and run away from her.

He tells her that he runs away only when things get sexy. And that’s not a commitment phobia. That is obviously because of the dick thing, hello? Like, this is obvious.

She tells him it is not at all obvious. Shut up.

He tells her that he understands her fears about driving him away because she cares too much. He tells her he feels the same way. He has spent the last day just terrified she was going to break up with him because she saw him cry so much, and crying is so disgusting and not very manly.

She is shocked by this confession. She grabs onto him urgently — startling him with this intensity — and she looks into his eyes and she tells him that she loved it when he cried. Because it meant that he felt comfortable enough around her to be completely vulnerable with her. Like, this shit is her jam, is he stupid? She loved it.

He says, “You are so weird.” He asks, “Are you really okay with the dick thing?”

She lightly hits his chest again. She says, “How many times do I have to assure you that I don’t care about the _dick thing?”_

“Honestly? Probably off and on, forever. Like, this will always be a thing about me.”

He asks her if she really thinks that he doesn’t pull his weight in their relationship. He tells her he’s been obsessing over this and he feels terrible about it.

She is seriously like, _“Huh?”_ just opening her dumb mouth and staring at him like he is crazy. She says, “What are you talking about?”

He has to remind of her the shitty things she drunkenly shouted at him after the concert. He has to relive it out loud.

Realization dawns on her at some point. Her eyes turn into saucers and she says, “Oh, wow! I did say those things!” And he already knows this, so he nods his head.

And then she tells him that she was really drunk and was being just a petty child by telling lies. She was just saying things to hurt him because she was horny and really sexually frustrated. Like, sorry about that. She knows he actually works very hard in their relationship and she appreciates it so much and she loves this about him. She says sorry again. She says, “Oops.”

He is like, “Oops?” He says, “What the fuck, Missandei? I tortured myself over that shit.”

She says, “Sorry, baby. I forgot I said that. I was so drunk. I have alcoholism in my genes. I can be a mean drunk, I guess. Sorry. I’ll work on it.”

That really takes the wind out of his potential rage-sails. He just relaxes and sinks into acceptance. He says, “Okay. That’s all I can ask.” And then he says, “Missandei, you are driving me nuts. Tell me what your dealbreaker is already.”

“Oh!” she says peppily, like she has just plum forgotten. “I just want to have babies! Or, just a baby. I just want kids. Or a kid. With you.” And then, completely dropping her cool, she raises her hands to her head. She covers her own ears — it looks so deliberate — and she starts to shriek, a little bit like how she shrieked when she saw the dead rat.

She is screaming because she _cannot_ believe she said this _out loud_ to _him._ She is literally telling a man that she wants to have his babies. It sounds utterly crazy.

He is wincing because she is basically screaming into his face. He is reaching out to grab at her wrists, so he can pry her hands off her ears. She is so fucking ridiculous. And she needs to hear this. He has to shout over her. He says, “We’re good, Missandei! I want kids, too!”

 

 

  
She’s so happy and so relieved that they are not breaking up — quite the opposite actually, they are probably going to be try and be together _forever._ She is so overcome by emotion that she grabs his face in both of her hands and she tries to kiss him.

He has to turn his head away and stop her with a bone-rattling push backwards.

She feels really hurt about it until he says, “Christ. You can’t kiss me right now unless you want to get sick for a week.”

She says, “Oh! Oops.”

He rolls his eyes and mockingly repeats her. He says, “Oops,” as he opens the shower stall open a crack and blindly palms around for his toothbrush and toothpaste.

He brushes his teeth as she washes and conditions her hair. She shivers because the water has gone cold. He watches the bubbles and the suds slide down her shiny body. The affirmation of how she feels about him — and the confession that she maybe would want to have his babies someday — has kind of changed a few things for him.

Like, it’s just outlook. And now, his outlook is not about staving off an uncertain future of pain and loss because he has done something to drive her away because he doesn’t know what she is thinking in relation to him.

His outlook subtly shifts and becomes how to make this work optimally, from here on out. Their relationship suddenly becomes mission-oriented to him. They just _have to_ figure out how to get along consistently with each other. They just _have to_ communicate better, say fewer emotional things while on alcohol. They just _have to_ learn how to have better sex.

Around his toothbrush, he tells her, “Like, you know we _can_ have children, right? Like, it’s biologically possible. You know that right?”

“I was ninety-nine percent sure,” she says. “Because your dad told me this once. But thanks for affirming that. Now I’m one hundred person sure. That’s awesome, Grey.”

He spits out toothpaste foam at his feet, spraying the both of them with his spit. The shower immediately wash it away. His rinses his mouth with lukewarm water and spits again. He is realizing that there is probably nothing he can do — short of emotional and physical abuse — to drive this person away.

This is true. She even thinks it’s really cute and a little bit hot that he just spat on her.

She sighs in affection and contentment as he advances on her, as he winds his arm around her waist and pulls her body up against his. She can smell the mint on his breath before she tastes it.

 

 

  
He lays her naked, wet body on his bed as he casually asks her if she just wants to move in together. Like, they already spend a shit ton of time together. They are always either at her apartment or in his apartment. It is annoying to constantly go back and forth for clothes and personal toiletries. They should just save money and live together.

She is breathing heavily and tearing up as he parts her legs, because they are _definitely_ about to have sex. And this guy just asked her to move in with him like he was asking her about what she wants for dinner. She says, “Yeah, let’s move in together.”

He says, “Great, it’s a plan,” as he rips open the top of the box of condoms that they bought the night before. He asks her, “How much does it bother you, that your parents hate me?” as he pulls out a packet.

She is drinking up everything. Because she doesn’t want to fucking miss a moment of this sexy shit. She tells him, “I don’t care how my parents feel about you. They are wrong.”

“It’s a bummer,” he says, as he just gets up and leaves the room. He is talking to her loudly as his voice retreats farther and farther away. He is saying, “You get along so great with my folks, and honestly, that makes me so happy. I’m bummed I can’t give you the same thing.”

When he comes back — stark naked and holding a pair of scissors, which makes her mind go _whaaat_ — he says, “I do get along with your brothers though. That’s something.”

She honestly says, “I love that you get along with my brothers. I love that they adore you. Baby, are you about to cut me?”

“Yeah,” he mutters. “I want to make sure your hymen is like, torn to shreds.”

She actually winces and curls up instinctively, at the imagined pain.

He says, “Whoa, that was really dark. Sorry, Miss. Just trying to keep it sexy like usual. The scissors are for this.” He climbs on the bed, looming over her so that she can get a good look at what he is doing. He is carefully cutting off the tip of the condom. And then he slides a scissor blade through the tunnel of the condom. And then he cuts it right down the line.

He closes the scissors and tosses it on the bed, freeing up a hand. He opens the latex and he shows it to her.

She is like, “Oh, shit.”

He grins. He says, “Yeah, you know what’s about to go down, don’t you? You’re a smart woman.”

And then they go through the list of all of her mental shit. He has to assure that he’s pretty sure she’s not going to poop on him. If she feels like she needs to poop, just tell him and they can like, take a break for her to go poop. It’s that simple. He has to assure that it’s okay if she doesn’t have an orgasm. He’s not one of those guys who beats up women because they don’t come. He is laughing because he thinks he’s hilarious as he says this — and she is stuck at wondering if there are really men who will beat up women because they don’t orgasm. That is kind of progressive and really misogynistic and terrible. Grey has to assure her that he’s going to be really into the taste of her vagina, but also get it straight. The point of the condom is so that he doesn’t get her fluids in his mouth. Like, they still both need to go to the doctor and get checked out. He’s probably not going to taste her at all today. He assures her that the smell of her is really nice. He knows this because he can smell her right now. She smells like about how he expects her to smell. No surprises. She does not smell like she has a yeast infection, for instance. The discharge looks nice and clear and normal.

He’s trying not to crack up.

Her face is _burning_ from mortification, and she’s trying to stop herself from burying it into a pillow. He’s trying to embarrass her and trying to convey to her that she’s being silly and pessimistic about her body. He seriously didn’t have to take this route with it. He could’ve just told her that her body is so gorgeous and it turns him on a lot.

“I mean, that’s true,” he tells her. “That is totally true. It also doesn’t negate the fact that your concerns about the attractiveness of your body are just irrational.”

“You are the biggest hypocrite ever,” she mutters, face pointed up to the ceiling.

“Yeah, I know,” he says.

 

 

 


	63. Grey refuses to finish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy and Grey continue life-hacking sex. Then they meet their besties for dinner. Drogo proceeds to tell Missy how she feels. Aw, he's the best.

 

 

  
She is very nervous about this, and he’s honestly not really helping her out very much. He just keeps smiling at her and laying chaste, closed-mouth kisses on her skin as he tells her that she’s so adorable. He tells her that he thinks it’s so cute that she’s so nervous.

She lying on her back. She’s damp, naked, and feeling tenderly vulnerable as she mutters, “I’m glad my fears and anxieties are amusing to you.”

He palms both of her cheeks. He is hovering over her. She can feel his knees pressing into her inner thighs as he leans down. He’s looking into her eyes, saying, “Do you not want to do this right now? It’s okay if you don’t.” He quickly presses his lips against hers. It causes her to shut her eyes. It also causes her to wind her arms around his shoulders.

His warm body relaxes as her hug gets tighter. He smells like soap, like their shower. She twists her head and buries her face into his neck. She tells him, “I want to. But —” She hesitates. Then she says, “Sometimes the stuff you say makes me feel embarrassed about my inexperience. Can you not say that my anxiety is cute?”

He tenses up. He pulls back a little to look at her face, withdrawing his warmth a little. He says, “Hey, I didn’t mean to make you feel like that.”

She gives him a small, shy smile.

He adds, “I know if you talked to me like that, I’d feel a certain way about it. So I’m sorry.”

 

 

  
He’s so in love with her — and he’s actually trying not to think too much about that because it ends up adding pressure on top of everything. He is trying to come to terms with having exploratory sex — sex that doesn’t result in an orgasm. He is trying to set himself up not to fail. She is _really_ anxious and _really_ deep in her own head. From past experiences — from his own experiences — he knows it’s not going to happen with her strung up tight like this.

He pulls the blankets over their bodies — so that she is warm and so that there’s some semblance of privacy. He thinks that make it will be more comfortable for her if she doesn’t have to see what’s going on. She can singularly focus on the feel of it.

He tries to make out with her a little bit. He moves slow and languidly, trying to make eye contact with her.

She is treating the kissing as a means to an end. She is kissing him back robotically and seemingly out of obligation. She breaks kisses quickly to peek at the curled up sheet of latex lying innocuously on the bed. She is fairly disconnected from his hands and his mouth on her boobs for the same reason. The sounds she makes are minimal. It’s not like how it’s been in the past, with her heavy panting and her moans and her sexy responsiveness. Today, oral is all she can think about.

He slows down on the foreplay after a certain point. He asks her if she wants to stop, trying not to let any frustration accidentally creep into his tone. He’s actually not frustrated at all. He’s actually a little concerned.

She quickly tells him she doesn’t want to stop at all. She tells him to keep going.

He tells her that it’s honestly been like he’s been trying to have sex with a corpse, just like on that documentary they just watched.

She is shocked into laughing. Her voice is scandalized and breathy as she says, “Grey! That’s a terrible thing to bring up! Right now? Really?”

He is chuckling ruefully. He is saying, “I know! I know! It’s just top of mind!”

Her disbelief melts into amusement. She stares up at him with affection. She grabs onto his whole head with both of her hands, and she pulls it down so he’s closer. She whispers to him that she loves him so much, as his smile just widens and gets deeper, as he eyes start getting brighter and shinier.

She gasps in surprise as his bare hand makes it way in between her legs. He has decided that the risk of this is stupid-low, and maybe he doesn’t need to shift the mood by digging around for a pair of latex gloves. He tells himself that he’s not going to be touching her like this for very much or for very long.

He actually snorts out another laugh, right into her ear, as she says, “Ah! You’re touching me!”

“This hand was touching a dead rat earlier today,” he whispers into her ear.

She says, “Oh my God,” and shuts her eyes, because this guy is most likely the future father of her children.

“You’re more slippery than last night. Which is a relief,” he tells her conversationally, as he thinks about it, and then _refrains_ from gently pushing a finger inside of her. “There was a freak moment where I was scared you developed like, vaginismus or something. But no. It was probably because you weren’t aroused enough, or at all.”

“Grey,” she says softly. “You’re making me self-conscious again.”

“Miss,” he says back at her. “Sorry, babe. Honestly, I’m super rusty at this. It’s been a really long time since I’ve done this. I think I’m trying to alleviate my own anxiety when I say these things.”

 

 

  
Now he is wearing gloves.

He is trying to like, map the terrain before he gets down there, because once he gets down there, it will be harder to talk to her. He is explaining this to her really flushed and embarrassed face. He figures out that she’s actually not especially sensitive, that she can take a fair bit of pressure without spasming. He is sitting in between her legs, carefully spreading her apart to get a good look at her. She lying on her back and she tells him that she cannot believe this is happening like this. This really _does_ feel like an exam at the doctor’s office, but kind of a sexy one. She tells him she feels so embarrassed, and constantly wants to shut her legs up tight. She promises him she’ll stop making him feel silly for his body image and dick issues. This is actually really scary, and she feels so vulnerable and like he is just judging her body all the time.

“Baby, I love your body,” he tells her. “I want to fuck with it. And don’t sweat the nervousness. You can be nervous. It _is_ kind of weird, what we are doing right now. Sex is kind of weird in general.” He crooks his finger inside of her a little bit, maybe around where her g-spot might be. He asks her, “How does this feel?”

“Uh, different but also the same?”

“Okay,” he says. “You are honestly not giving me a lot of information right now. But that’s cool. Do you want to stop or take a break?”

“No, I’m good. I want to keep going.”

“I can hear your stomach growling.”

“Oh.”

He smiles. He can see her lashes fluttering, beyond the mounds of her breasts. “Do you wanna go grab dinner after this?”

“Yes,” she says softly.

She really wishes that she can make this feel less awkward and telegraph way less fear. She wishes that she can force her body into relaxing. She wishes she isn’t constantly on the verge of crying. She wishes that she had gotten these hang-ups out of her system before she met him, because he doesn’t deserve this. He keeps asking her if she is okay, which continues giving her a complex. It continues to make her feel insecure and afraid. She wonders if there’s really much that he can say or do — beyond what he is already doing — that will make this easier. He is already perfect.

She says, “We should just go for it. We should just do it fast.”

He says, “Babe,” reluctantly. He doesn’t think this is a good idea at all. He doesn’t think he wants for her to grin and bear it at all.

“Just try it,” she urges.

He starts to sigh — just in a natural kind of way — and then he gets nervous that she’ll interpret it the wrong way — like, as judgemental. So he quickly shifts. He clears his throat instead. He says, “Okay.”

She makes another whimper sound, when he finally does push her legs out farther, situates himself in between her knees, squirts a dollop of lube over one side of the condom, positions that side over her opening. And then he gets down low to the mattress and presses his mouth and lips over that.

She says, “Oh my God,” as her hands start grabbing onto the duvet cover and his sheets. She is pulling the blankets and sheets over him, covering him. She is pulling the blanket and sheets over her breasts, up to her neck.

She starts breathing heavily. Her body does a full flush of heat, as her brain tells itself that he is going down on her, that he is eating her out in a sexually responsible way. Her face goes to fire, when she feels his tongue firmly sweep _around_ her clit — her brain is screaming ‘oh my God!’ about it. She can’t tell if he is good at this or just okay at it or even if he is bad at it. She cannot mentally get past just the existence of the act. She starts tearing up — and her body starts trembling.

She alternates between being just scared that sex will never be consistently great — and being surprised by the moments her mind loosens up and he gets a spot in the right way and her body takes over — she gasps. She can feel him pause. She can’t see him or his face. He is just a mound underneath the covers. She is sweating so hard. She can almost hear him internalize the information. And she releases the breath she is holding in as he repeats what he just did.

She can’t let go of her thoughts. Her mind is running frantically. She starts to wonder if it smells underneath the blankets. She starts to worry if he can even breathe well. She is really convinced that this is not ideal at all, but he is putting up with it because she’s so fucking mental and she ruins _everything_ with her broken brain. She is convinced that he is changing his mind right now — that he doesn’t want them to move in together and he doesn’t actually want to make a life with her.

She just gets incredibly self-conscious as long minutes pass in silence — and it’s _her fault_ it’s quiet. She also gets incredibly self-conscious when she can pick out the wet suction sound of his hot mouth running against her unresponsive and scared-stupid fucking body.

Her body goes rigid as her mind pumps out these self-loathing thoughts.

He pauses as she’s locked in her own mind. She’s in deep enough that she jumps in surprise when he plants a kiss on her thigh. He is reluctant to pull off the blanket to get some air. He has the sense that it would make her feel anxious. It is really hot and humid underneath the blanket, and he puts up with it, as he tells her, “It’s okay, babe. You’re doing great.”

She says, “I’m really not. You are literally doing all of the work.”

And then they resume. It does not get much better. It actually only gets incrementally more numbing for her, as pleasure retreats farther and farther away, the longer and longer it takes. She gets more and more despondent. She feels more and more hopelessness. She actually starts to cry over it.

Under the blankets, he can sense that he's like, really losing her. He feels that it will be a huge setback for them, if he were to ask her if she just wants to stop sex and come back to it at a later time. He feels she will be really upset about this. This is why he says, “Hey, do you wanna switch for a while?”

 

 

  
Her eyes are full of unshed tears when she finally and gently pushes the blanket off of him, exposing her body and his again. She starts dropping the tears when she sees . . . just how damp and humid he looks. It a stupid trigger, but she just feels so bad.

He pretty much ignores the tears, in order to not exacerbate them. And it’s taking him a considerable amount of courage and bravery to do this. He honestly thought _he’d_ have more time to emotionally get ready for this. He thought they’d have more other kinds of sex, before they did this.

But she looks like she really needs it, and he loves her so much. He tells himself that these two things are true, so no big deal.

He asks her if maybe she might want to try going down on him for awhile. “If you want to, that is,” he says, as his heart throbs in his throat, as he makes himself look straight into her crying face. “No pressure at all.”

She really _does_ need something to grasp onto. Her mind needs something to focus on, so she is immediately attentive and alert. She knows what he is doing. She’s trying not to think too much about it, otherwise she will be paralyzed by guilt. She reaches up to wipe her eyes quickly. She looks down into his lap. Her voice is hoarse, as she says, “How? Can you . . . help me get started?”

So he cuts up another condom. As he does this, he tells her it’s not that hard. He grimly smiles at the accidental pun. He warns her that he leaks sometimes during sex — because his body is special and his control over this stuff is different from other guys. He has to explain to her that _that’s_ why the condom is important. He also tells her, “Hey, and no pressure to like reciprocate exactly. Like, no pressure on the oral. Like, you can use your hands only, if you want. If that’s more comfortable for you.”

She firmly tells him, “No, I want to. With my mouth.” She even points to her face to confirm this point.

He is like, “Okay,” as he looks around the room, as his face and body starts tingling with throbbing numbness.

He gives over control to her — he hands her the condom and the bottle of lube, figuring that the mechanics of this will be somewhat empowering for her. She nervously gets into position — kneeling in between his legs on the bed. She squirts cold lube on the condom and spreads it around. He tells her it’s so it feels more natural. She nods gravely. She has figured as much.

She positions the condom just on top of the circular base of where he was cut. She kind of mimics how he did this to her. She nervously keeps asking him if she is doing everything okay — and if she isn’t, can he please tell her? He runs his hand over her cheek, caressing it, as his heart slams in his chest. He tells her that she is doing great.

She says, “Sorry, can we keep the covers off? I mean — we don’t have to. But I mean — I would like to see what I’m doing. Because I’ve never done this before. I mean, obviously I have never done this exact thing before. Like, you know. It's your body and you'd remember. But I mean — we can pull the covers up if that makes you feel better —”

“Miss,” he interrupts, trying to sound smooth about it. “The covers can be off. It’s fine. Whatever you need — is totally fine.”

A faraway part of him realizes that he is doing exactly what he promised himself he wouldn’t ever do again. It sounds like he is making someone else feel better about his body. It sounds like he is pushing all of his own hangups and his own feelings down, just to spare someone else.

“Sorry, baby,” she says, kind of miserably. “I am so sorry I’m like this. I’m sorry you have to teach me _so much.”_

So he looks at her face, and he knows that there is complexity in this. He knows that he isn’t trying to make her feel better about his body. He is trying to make the both of them feel better about sex. He knows there is nuance here. He knows that she realizes what is going on, too. He knows what she is apologizing for. She also remembers every terrible fight they’ve had that has been related to this. He knows that she is afraid that he was right when he was at his angriest.

“Really,” he says. “Please stop apologizing. This isn’t bothering me, right now. I don’t mind . . . teaching, right now.” He keeps having to add in a timestamp to it all. Because he can’t be sure that it won’t bother him _later._

“Grey. I love you more than anything.”

“I know you do,” he respond automatically. And then he softly laughs in reflex. His body rocks forward a little bit, from his chuckling, as he says, “And I reciprocate. I love you more than anything, too.”

 

 

  
He is pretty quiet when he feels her lips touch down cautiously on this really intimate part of his body. Even though there’s barrier in between them, he can feel the heat from her mouth, her lips, her tongue. He can also feel her breath.

He is so glad he is not sobbing hysterically right now. God, it’s always a surprise.

His heart is pounding as he assesses how he feels. And it’s pretty okay. He starts taking in deep breaths so that he doesn’t end up passing out from holding his breath. He watches her look up at him, as she goes down him. And it is kind of embarrassing.

And also really fucking _hot._

He realizes that he is being deathly quiet and giving her no feedback at all. He has to swallow a lump in his throat. He can barely hear himself as he says, “Ah, you’re doing good. That feels good.”

“You promise?” she asks, lifting her face up. “You’re not lying to preserve my feelings?”

“Promise,” he tells her, as watches her resume what she is doing. He watches as she self-consciously kisses him softly over the condom. She’s gunshy because the last time they did something like this, she slapped him in the balls and incapacitated him for a moment.

She becomes a little bolder when he gets the fuck over himself and some of his hang-ups and tells her that he likes it when she licks him hard, when she licks the parts where the base meets the rest of him. He tells her that the center of what is left is just dead tissue. He doesn’t know if that’s normal or if it’s because of his accident or what, but the center does nothing. It’s the perimeter that is sensitive.

This knowledge is like — this becomes something good and special for them. She just tries something. She forms her lips into a circle and full-on presses _around him._ She lightly sucks. He groans and spasms — she freezes for a split second to see if it hurts — they make eye content — both just bewildered and unsure.

And then she repeats, with the eye contact unsevered.

His body jolts again. He swallows his spit. He looks at her with such helplessness and disbelief.

After that, his feedback becomes visceral and authentic and real. He starts panting. He starts swearing. He starts saying, “Holy shit.” He stops himself from saying it feels so fucking good, because his brain just won’t let him.

She builds on what she has learned. She basically does variations of the same thing. She drinks up his responses greedily with her eyes. When he tries to scoot away from her, she digs her fingers into the sides of his ass and holds him place. She almost cries when he whimpers and just gives up and submits. Time becomes a blur. His face gets a little puffy from holding back — and because he is so turned on.

He shouts, “What the fuck!” at her when she reaches in between his legs with her hand and holds the mass of his balls in her palm. She knows he is really turned on because he is tight and condensed, not loose and a little saggy. She knows that there’s no fucking way he is faking this, because he can’t will his body into doing _this._ She knows he’s not doing this to make her feel better and to prop up her self-esteem — as he starts muttering her name over and over, as he starts touching her face a little roughly, as he starts warning her that they need to stop soon.

What the fuck? Stop?

She wants to tell him that she wants for him to finish. She thinks it will be sexy, and she wants it to happen for this reason. She’s afraid to take her mouth off of him to tell him this, because she is afraid he’s going to freak out and shove her face off his body once an insecure thought worms its way into his brain.

He doesn’t want to finish — mostly because his brain cannot compute this right now. When they started this, he didn’t plan on finishing — and he’s just really irrationally committed to that. He clenches up real tightly as a wave of just amazing ass pleasurable shit, timed with the sweep of her tongue, just gives him a full body tingle and spasm. He is saying, “Ah, let’s take a break, babe. Pause, baby. Pause.”

She pauses for only a brief second to say, “It’s okay. Let’s keep going.”

And he listens for her for a while, as she goes back down on him.

But then his brain starts to panic all over again. And then he saying, “Stop,” again. “No. Come on, stop. Please stop!” as she finally lets him go and quickly sits up.

He automatically puts his hands in between his legs and covers himself up. He says, “Ah, fuck!” as his body twists in a spasm that is a mix of pain and pleasure. He accidentally touched himself where her mouth was. He is really, really sensitive right now.

She is looking at him with concern. She says, “Oh my God, are you okay?”

 

 

  
After he assures her that he’s totally okay — he’s a stupid fucking asshole, actually — well, he sounds like himself. And relief just floods her. She was so scared she had done something egregiously bad at the end there — scared and mystified.

She is running her puffy, swollen, warm lips over his and sitting in his lap — which she crawled onto after she pulled her panties back on — to keep fluid exchange to a real minimum. She making soft cooing noises — these breathy sighs of happiness as she runs her hands up and down his back and shoulders comfortingly. She is taking his freakout in stride, hugging him and kissing him on the mouth and on his stubbly cheek before she softly asks him why he wanted to stop.

He repeats that he feels like a real stupid asshole — and he’s trying to figure this out himself. He says, “I was going to come.”

She smiles at that — she presses her smile into his cheek. She huskily says, _“Yeah,_ you _were.”_ It sounds all victorious and self-satisfied. She presses another kiss into the side of his face. “How come you didn’t want to come?”

“I don’t know!” he says, just aghast over this. “Maybe I was scared of the crazy mess it was going to make against your face. Okay, I remember the condom now, but still! And maybe I was scared of letting you see me finish. Maybe I was scared you were going to be disgusted by . . . how I finish. Maybe I just wanted to talk it all out so no one is surprised by what _happens,_ before it actually happens — but there was just no time for a chat ‘cause it was happening so fast! So I _panicked_ and said stop.”

 

 

  
They decide to go grab sushi for dinner. She ends up wearing his clothes — a t-shirt and his basketball shorts. And she is wearing his flip-flops because it looked completely ridiculous for her to wear her leather oxfords with this outfit. She keeps her hair wrapped. She smears lotion on her legs, arms, and face. She looks at herself in the mirror and out loud, she says, “Are you _kidding me?”_

Grey is on his phone, texting Drogo back. He accidentally ignored Drogo all day, after he hysterically texted Drogo the other night when he was depressed, lonely, and a bundle of anxiety. He texted Drogo the other night to see what Drogo was up to. Drogo reluctantly said he was busy with some other people — work friends. Drogo asked if everything was okay.

And then Grey just went over to his parents house and the rest is history. He has not texted Drogo back since. He forgot to. Drogo has sent a few follow-ups, to the tune of: _Hey are you okay? You’re worrying me right now._

Grey knows he’s such a fucking dipshit. He is trying to make it up to Drogo and ask the guy if he can buy the guy and his cold wife, if she is free, some dinner. He tells Drogo that Drogo can even go omakase if Drogo really wants to.

To Missandei, Grey absently says, “What’s up, babe?”

“I look so cute,” she says in a deadpan.

He actually thinks she’s serious because he’s not paying attention. His face is pointed to his phone screen as he says, “You look nice.”

 

 

  
Drogo releases a shit-eating grin when he sees Missandei walk into the restaurant in her get-up. She takes one look at the neon blue lights and hears the quiet drone of unobtrusive EDM and she starts trying to comically back out. Grey is right behind her, with his hand on her back, blocking her from exiting.

Next to Drogo, his wife quietly says, “Do _not_ say anything about her outfit.”

“Dany,” he says. “I’m not an idiot.” And then when Grey and Missandei get to the table, he says, “Well, if it isn’t Grey and Grey’s boyfriend! How was the big game, sport? Didja underdog team win the championship in spite of the odds?”

 _“Shut up!”_ Missandei and Dany both snap in unison. Dany shoves him for good measure.

Grey randomly yawns and cracks his neck as he pulls out his chair. He says, “Yeah, she’s really sensitive about how she looks right now. I keep telling her no one even gives a shit, and no one is staring at her.”

“Pretty woman privilege is such a thing,” Drogo says. “Are you pissed that not all the men in the restaurant want to do you favors and pay attention to the things you are saying because they want to fuck you?”

“That’s really _not_ why I’m pissed,” Missandei pointedly says to him. “I’m actually mostly pissed because my partner has been disregarding my feelings the entire drive here, and I’m pissed because my friend is a fucking misogynist who thinks I only care about being pretty enough to get _fucked.”_

“Miss, it has got be a little bit about that. Because otherwise why are you so ticked off you are not cute right now? Like, be self-aware.”

 

 

 

 


	64. Missy gets checked for STIs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy is a good partner and goes to the doctor to get checked for sex infections. It opens an entire can of worms of stuff she has not considered before. Grey is having a pretty chill existence, by comparison. His mind is mostly on the massacre of rats.

 

New and improved Missandei gets tested at dinner. Grey and Drogo basically keep insisting that she’s a superficial twit who can’t stand not being under the male gaze. She keeps telling them that she will cop to some superficiality, but she also is paranoid that people will notice her too much and think badly of her and her family. Her mom has messed with her through years of being obsessed with her hair texture and years of lamenting her health issues and her skin and body — so Missy’s mostly worried about reflecting Naathi people negatively by looking like trash while out in public. That is the source of her anxiety, not the whole not being fuckable thing. Beyond Grey, she actually would rather not be fuckable to most men.

Grey and Drogo are _completely_ not getting this. They keep telling her that she benefits from pretty woman privilege, something that she is completely not disputing. But they keep laughingly yelling variations of this in her face. She has to expend a lot of effort toward not taking it too personally. She has to remind herself that this is how friends talk to each other sometimes. This is how outgoing, opinionated people engage in discourse.

Dany starts policing her food for her, even though it’s sushi and it’s pretty clean to eat. Dany starts mothering her hardcore, telling Missandei to just ignore Grey and Drogo because they are being silly assholes. Dany tells Missy that she gets it — she gets where Missy is coming from. She says that societal pressure on women to present is just immense.

And then she fluffs up Missandei’s napkin and places it in her lap for her.

Missandei spends dinner trying not to jump in her seat in surprise whenever Drogo rudely guffaws loudly and disruptively because of something not-really-that-funny that Grey says. Grey talks about their friend Balaq being a ray of light, for instance. And she jolts in her seat when Drogo suddenly slams his fist down on the table and starts laughing obnoxiously over what is clearly a stupid inside joke.

Dany starts getting hammered even though it is a Sunday night and she has work the next morning. As Missy politely refuses a teeny cup of sake and tries not to give any secrets away under Dany’s withering stare — Dany feels judged for being the only female who is drinking, which is rich because _no one is judging anybody else_ besides Dany herself.

Dany gets hammered and starts trying to pry out these secrets. Dany wants to know why Missy is so uppity and won’t drink. Missy has to carefully explain that she’s been drinking a lot lately, and she’s trying to be more moderate about it because she gets so emotional when she drinks. Her stomach also feels icky sometimes when she drinks too much.

Dany wants to know if more “stuff” has happened since they last talked. Missandei has to stop herself from covering her face over Dany’s complete lack of subtlety. Missy has to pointedly glare at Dany for Dany to _kind of_ get the message.

To her left, Grey suspiciously asks, “What stuff?”

“She’s referring to sex,” Drogo effortlessly supplies.

And then Grey stiffens. He mutters, “Ah. You guys have been talking about me. Wonderful.” And then he throws his napkin down on the tabletop and says, “I gotta go to the bathroom. Is that great timing or what?”

“Babe,” Missy says, letting her eyes follow him as he stands up.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Not a big deal.”

They watch him retreat. And after he’s gone down the hallway that leads to the toilets, Missandei reaches over and shoves Dany lightly.

Dany is snickering and saying, “What? Is it a secret or something? I mean, he _knows_ he had sex with you, _right?”_

Drogo is also snickering and saying, “He’s not a happy camper right now.”

Missy says, “Oh, ya think?”

“Seriously,” Dany says, taking a small sip from her sake glass. “Did more _stuff_ happen?”

“Yeah, a lot of stuff has happened,” Missandei says in irritation.

“Like, _a lot-a lot?”_

“Dany, are we talking about the same thing?”

“I’m talking about oral,” Dany says bluntly. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh,” Missy says, blinking rapidly in surprise, relaxing some. “We _are_ talking about the same thing.”

As Grey reappears across the restaurant, face tense and eyes searching again for their table, Dany sways in her seat, leans down, and then conspiratorially whispers, “Did anyone _orgasm?”_

Missy makes eye contact with Grey — gets nervously spastic about it — and then cuts eye contact immediately in a really suspicious manner. She is waving her hands in front of her face in a panic as Drogo laughs. Drogo is muttering, “He peed so fucking fast, what the fuck?”

Missy is waving her hands and quickly saying, “Oh my God, shut up. Shut up! Shh! Don’t talk about this in front of him! He’s sensitive about it!”

“What do you mean he’s _sensitive?”_ Dany asks.

“Babe,” Drogo says, right as Grey gets back to the table. “You are great sometimes.”

As he takes his seat again, Grey calmly says, “Did y’all have a nice time talking about me behind my back?”

Dany beams at him.

Then Dany says, “We were talking about sex.”

 

 

  
After dinner, Missy has to contend with mixed feelings. She is hugging and glaring at their best friends in goodbye. Some of the alcohol has run through Dany’s system, and she is not apologetic at all. She just sighs dreamily and squeezes Missandei a little bit tighter. Dany just says, “You smell nice — clean. You’ve got that going for you today, at least.”

Missy flashes back to the one time she was depressed enough that Dany had to come over and drag Missy into the tub. That was embarrassing. So much of her memories are tinged with embarrassment.

When they are finally by themselves, in the car, Missy immediately and nervously tells Grey that she didn’t say anything especially bad to Dany about him — ever. She is expecting him to be upset or hurt or angry with her because he is a very private person. She tells him she knows how she’d feel if he was going around telling Drogo — the _misogynist_ — how she is in bed. She would feel really betrayed and really wounded by that. Not only because sex has been a little bit of a miss lately, but also because it’s so dehumanizing for her to be objectified like that among a bunch of dudes. Like, she would not like if he did that at all. Thus, she would never intentionally do this to him.

She looks at his face as he checks his left side mirror. She searches his expression for signs that maybe he has actually done this and she is just shoving her feet right down her fucking throat.

She can read nothing on his face.

She quickly tells Grey that, if anything, she’s only said a bunch of really nice and really obsessively romantic things about him and them — like how she wants to bury her nose in his armpit and smell him as she naps, like how she’d like to make a perfume out of the scent of his skin so she can carry the smell of him to work.

She realizes just how fucking creepy that sounds, after it’s already too late and out of her mouth.

She tells him barely talks about sex in an explicit way. Just once. There was this one time. And it wasn’t like, unflattering at all. She told Dany that she’s really attracted to him and is DTF again and stuff.

Her anxiety is reaching a fever pitch as his hand gently pats her on the knee. He says, “Relax. Holy shit, breathe.”

She immediately complies with what he is asking of her. She pulls in a deep breath.  
He conversationally says, “It doesn’t bother me. I know friends talk to each other. I just think it’s a little weird Dany is so interested in our sex life. But she’s probably a perv like her husband —”

“Ugh, Dany was being indelicate because she was drinking —”

“Yeah, she has a real delicate sensibility usually,” he says in deadpan.

And when she doesn’t laugh — he laughs for her. He reaches over to gently push her.

He says, “Miss, do I make you feel like I’m about to have a meltdown any moment if you make one wrong move or something?” He briefly pauses. “Is it the crying? Did the crying make you think —”

“Babe, it’s not the crying! —”

“I know,” he says, still very even and casual. “That’s a joke. I was just playing the part of myself, the strung out, nervously naked version of myself. Remember how I got all hysterical about crying? That was good times.”

Missandei says nothing in response to this. Her pulse is just thundering in her head and she doesn’t know what to make of any of this.

“We’ve haven’t been very sync’ed up the last few days, huh?” he offers. “You’re not getting any of my jokes and the sex has been, you know — pretty bad.”

Her shoulders slump in defeat.

“Missandei!” he suddenly shouts. “That was a joke! Holy shit! You are making me feel like a bully or something now.”

She’s shaking her head. She asks, “Do you really think the sex has been bad?”

“No, Miss. Every time I get naked with you and don’t end up curled up in the fetal position and sobbing is a fucking rousing success to me, to be honest.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Kind of.”

 

 

  
Once they arrive back at his apartment, he deliberately skips over his parking spot and drives over to guest parking, where her car has been left for the entire weekend. He lightly tells her that he’ll wash her clothes and he’ll hang them up in his closet for the next time she sleeps over.

She understands what he’s gently laying down. He wants to spend the night apart. She’s too embarrassed and self-conscious to ask him why he’s sick of her already. Is it because of dinner? Is it because of the awkward sex they’ve been having? Is it because she’s unfunny and terrible at jokes? Is it because she’s not cool? Is it because he suddenly realizes he thinks it’s way too soon to live together? Is it because he is changing his mind about wanting to have babies with her? Are they ever going to talk about either things again? Will she have to be the one to bring it up even though the thought is just so humiliatingly scary and vulnerable? Will she have to utter the words: _Did you really mean it, or was that a joke, too?_

He interrupts her thoughts by saying, “I’m gonna try and make an appointment with my doctor tomorrow.” He is actually dropping her off at her car because she has absolutely nothing to wear to work tomorrow, and she was utterly miserable over not looking cute at dinner. Like, she needs to go home and take care of herself.

She tries to smiles at him. It comes out looking shy and soft. She says, “Me too. With my own doctor, I mean for an STD check. I mean, I probably don’t have syphilis. But I mean, it doesn’t hurt to be absolutely sure.”

He takes her nervous rambling in stride. He leans across his center console to kiss her mouth — with just the pouty ends of his lips. He murmurs, “Drive safe, okay? Text me when you get home?”

 

 

  
Missandei feels overwhelmed on Monday, even though work is completely normal. She comes in, grabs coffee, reads her emails, and tries to ignore the obsessive thoughts in the back of her mind about her relationship — just every dangling thing about it. Her brain is holding onto a repository of thoughts about her family and how her parents would feel if she just never got married. Her brain keeps imagining — in flashes — the logistics how she will have to forever keep Grey separate from them because they are awful and she doesn’t want to subject him to their cruelty. She keeps tearing up, when she thinks about drifting away from her parents over time, because they refuse to budge in how they feel.

She is thinking about what love actually looks like, because she doesn’t have a great model of it. She is wondering if other women obsess and constantly evaluate the veracity of the things their partners say to them like she does. Is she normal?

Her phone rings during her lunch break, as she sits in the waiting room of her doctor’s office. She doesn’t pick up because she doesn’t recognize the number, so she lets it go to voicemail.

Her voicemail app actually transcribes messages for her. She straightens in her seat and holds the phone closer to her face, when she realizes through the garbled transcription that Zinash called her — the guy her mom was trying to set her up with.

Missy is raging when she is finally seen by her doctor. She is so pissed at her mother that her blood pressure reading is fucked and the medical assistant expresses surprise over the reading. Missandei vaguely tells the MA that her body is really stressed out right now.

Missy is given five minutes alone to try and calm down, before they do another reading.

The five minutes make no difference whatsoever.

When Missandei sees Dr. Mormont, she has this terribly mortifying conversation with her doctor about her new sex partner — the fact that she currently only has one sex partner, the fact that he is male, the fact that she has had penetrative and oral sex and has not yet engaged in anal sex, the fact that she has not actually noticed anything amiss with her vagina.

Her face is bleeding heat as she quietly tries to calm her own nerves by telling Dr. Mormont that she knows she probably doesn’t have an STI — she knows she’s being extra cautious since she hasn’t had another sex partner in years. And she’s been very careful with her current partner.

Dr. Mormont straight up tells Missy that she isn’t being overly cautious. Dr. Mormont sees patients all the time who don’t have an accurate gauge on their sexual activities or they are just misinformed about sexually transmitted infections. Dr. Mormont plainly tells Missandei a story about how she once had a patient with a herpes lesion that went undiagnosed for more than 20 years. The woman was 64 when she got tested, and it turns out she had herpes simplex 1 and herpes simplex 2. Dr. Mormont also adds, “It’s not too big of a deal though. Most people who have herpes are asymptomatic and are unaware they have it.”

Missandei wants to scream out something like: _WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL!_

In reality, Missandei is pretty polite to authority figures. Instead of yelling, she appears pretty calm as she says, “This isn’t helping my anxiety very much,” which makes her doctor smile. Her doctor knows all about Missandei’s anxiety. Because she’s the one who coordinates with Olenna and prescribes Missandei’s meds.

Her doctor says, “Have you observed any sores? On or around your mouth or on your genitals?”

“Can you define sores? And I honestly don’t look at my vagina very much — if ever. But one time I had a bump down there that I could feel — but it went away on its own. I didn’t think any of it because I wasn’t having sex. And I’ve always used condoms the handful of times I’ve had sex. But I get sores in my mouth sometimes. Are those cold sores?” She grimaces. “Oh my God, do I have mouth herpes?”

She is thinking about all of the times — the three times probably — that she allowed a boy’s penis into her mouth without any barrier at all. It makes her feel sick.

So, Missandei and her doctor have to go through what the difference is between cold sores and canker sores. By the end of the conversation, Missy feels like a fucking idiot, and she is about 80 percent sure she’s only suffered from canker sores and the occasional zit around her mouth during puberty. Probably. Hopefully.

Missandei then spreads her legs out further, tries not to cover her face in shame, and lets her doctor just examine the hell out of her vagina — the outside of it, the inside of it, the deeper inside of it. It gets swabbed.

Then her doctor examines her anus, even though Missandei is one hundred percent sure that nothing sexual has ever happened there. The one time her ex-boyfriend suggested it, she broke down sobbing because she thought he was treating her like she was a prostitute-porn-star. She felt he was trying to force her into sexual servitude. After that, she wouldn’t even let him touch her butt without freaking out over it. She has some real issues with anal stuff that comes from somewhere she has not ever examined yet.

Her doctor is already in the neighborhood, and she doesn’t completely trust Missandei’s memories, so she checks the anus. And visually, it looks fine. She still swabs a sample for testing though.

Dr. Mormont doesn’t think Missandei needs a test for HSV-1 and HSV-2 because there’s such a strong stigma associated with that infection, and Missandei suffers from an anxiety disorder already.

Here, Missandei insists on it. She says, “I want to know if I have it.”

So her blood gets taken.

After the entire gauntlet, Missandei is told that results will come back within the next three days or so. She will receive a call or a letter in the mail.

Missandei blurts out, “Which is it?” feeling mightily embarrassed because she is hyper-aware that her eagerness to know if she has herpes or another STI is so she can be sexually active with abandon.

“How about you call us in a few days, if you don’t hear from us?” her doctor offers.

Missy nods. “Okay.”

 

 

  
Missandei wants to save the entire Zinash conversation for when they see each other in person. So, on the phone, driving to Olenna’s office after work, Missy finds out that Grey didn’t see his doctor today at all.

She is dumbfounded. She is silent and thinking as she merges into traffic. And then back into the phone receiver, which is hooked up to bluetooth, she tries to strip the judgement out of her tone before she asks him why he didn’t see his doctor.

Grey tells her that his doctor is really busy and thus booked. He can read her anxiety on the other side, so he tells her that technically, he told her he’d _call_ his doctor today to make an appointment today. And that’s exactly what he did. His appointment is at the end of the week. He needs a check-up anyway, so they’re gonna lump it in all together — otherwise he’d go to a clinic or something. But this isn’t really an emergency. It’s just a week.

Missy is having a pretty tiring day. She is tuckered out from her thrumming anxiety. She wants to blurt out that she doesn’t understand his fucking priorities at all. Does he want to continue having sex with her or not?

She is intensely quiet, because she is refraining from getting upset about this at him. Her brain already knows he is being reasonable, and it is not at all his fault — that his doctor is busy.

In the awkward silence, he asks, “So, uh. Do you wanna like — hang out after work or nah?”

“I have a therapy appointment today. I’m actually going to it right now.”

“Oh sweet,” he drawls. “Maybe you can talk to your therapist about how you wanted to overreact when I told you I can’t see my doctor until Friday.”

She automatically scoffs in surprise — at his audacity. And after the initial shock of his statement ebbs, she relaxes and smiles into the phone. He can’t see her, but he can hear her voice soften. She looks at the people rushing by in front of her on the crosswalk — it’s the happy hour rush. She says, “Wanna meet me at my place around seven?”

“Maybe a little later than that,” he offers. “I need to stop off at my folks to collect the corpses of dead rats. Hopefully.”

“That’s sexy,” she whispers. “Do you wanna bring a change of clothes to my place?”

“Oh shit. What for?” he says. “No, just kidding. I know what for. I know why you want me to see my doctor ASAP. See you tonight.”

Before he hangs up, she quickly says, “Grey!”

He is like, “What?”

She says, “Um, bring — also remember — to bring — um —”

“Protection?” he supplies.

She rolls her eyes at herself. “Yes.”

“Gotcha,” he says. “Thanks for the reminder, Missandei. Do you want me to bring dinner, too? I will hopefully have a lot of rat meat in my possession —”

“Grey —”

“I know. You don’t think I’m funny.”

 

 

 

 


	65. Missy and Grey do it again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will Missy and Grey ever have good sex?! Will Missy go on the date that her mom is desperately wishing she'd go on?! Are Grey and Missy going to last?!

 

 

  
When he appears at her front door, he has a lazy smile on his face and a bag, presumably an overnight bag, hooked over his shoulder. He is also holding a couple paper bags with handles, which she can smell right away. It’s curry. He lifts them up and says, “Hungry?”

She is immediately worried about her stomach. Even though she knows he’s hypervigilant about gluten and dairy, she is also sensitive to spice and also to fat. Anything that throws off her gut bacteria is liable to give her diarrhea.

She is at the point in their relationship where she can be straight up about this with him. She ushers him into her apartment and sardonically says, “Bro, you are just asking to get pooped on, aren’t you?”

He raises his brows — not expecting an accusation. He actually expected a thank you. He walks into her kitchen, places the bags on the counter, and starts unpacking. He looking at what he’s doing as he says, “You seriously have a one-track mind.” And then he lifts his face to smile at her. He adds, “Have you eaten? If you’re really worried about it, there’s plenty of rice. You can just eat _that.”_

He ends up pouring himself a glass of wine with his dinner. He offers her a glass of her own wine, but she wrinkles her nose and shakes her head no. She also ends up picking at her food.

When he comments on it, she tells him that her stomach is a little bit nervous and she doesn’t want to push it. She tells him that before she met him, she ate really basically most of the time — a side of rice, a side of steamed veggies, and maybe a little bit of meat. That is it. He has inspired her to be more adventurous with food. And sometimes there is a cost to that. She drinks from a glass of water and, in between sips, she tells him that her stomach is still learning how to roll with variety.

Then she asks him how his rat murder is going. He laughs into his glass of wine, fogging it up. He comments that it’s going perfectly fine — as expected. He spares her further detail.

He scarfs down the food like he skipped lunch or something. He pretty much inhales it and chews fast in a way that is almost unattractive to watch — yet she manages to still find the novelty of a man so domestic and so comfortable in her home to be very attractive. She thinks back to the first time she took him here. She was drunk, and he drove her home. He took off some of his clothes and ended up sleeping on her couch. They were platonic acquaintances on the verge of becoming good friends.

Nowadays, she sleeps in the same bed with him, and she gets to have sex with him.

This is still a trip to her.

Their conversation ends up being surface-lying and mundane and one-sided, because his mouth is busy.

She makes conversation by carefully telling him bland highlights from her therapy session. In actuality, she spent the bulk of her time with Olenna obsessing about sex, obsessing about cohabitating, and obsessing about babies. Olenna, in her therapist-y way, basically told Missy to try and chill out on all three things because her anxiety is throwing a party inside her mind right now. None of these things have to be figured out _right now._

Instead of inundating Grey with a bunch of interrogations on the timeline of future events — when they are going to move in together, if at all — when they might start talking about having babies together, if at all — Missandei just tells him that she talked to Olenna about family and her parents and the expectations parents have for their children versus the reality.

Grey grunts with his mouth full, conveying that he can relate.

Then Missy says, “The guy my mom is trying to set me up with called me today. I didn’t pick up because I didn’t recognize the number. He left me a voice message.”

Grey’s face reflects mild surprise. He makes direct eye contact with her. It makes her flush a little bit. And then he puts up a finger, signalling to her that he wants to talk, but he has to chew first.

And then after a few seconds, he washes down his food with a sip of wine before he says, “What did his voicemail say?”

“Oh, he just said hello, asked me what I’m doing. He said he’s new in town, and his mom told him that I knew the city well — so he was wondering if I wanted to get together to catch up.”

“He’s going through a divorce, right?” Grey asks.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Grey frowns. “That sucks.”

And then a long, but not altogether uncomfortable silence goes by. In that time, Missy blushes. She’s blushing because she remembers that the last time this sort of thing came up, she got at Grey because she could not properly process her feelings about her parents, specifically her mom. Missy remembers getting angry with him because he didn’t display enough jealousy.

Finally, he says, “So, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna call him back or nah?” He’s choosing his words carefully, too. Because he does not want to fight about this again, either.

She gently says, “What do you want me to do?”

With a tad more forthrightness, Grey says, “I can’t tell you what to do, Missandei.”

She says, “I know. That’s why I asked you what you _want_ me to do.”

“I honestly have relatively low investment in this,” he admits. “So I don’t really care what you do.” And then he quickly says, “That doesn’t mean I have low investment in you and how you feel about it.”

She can tell he is being very careful and avoiding any of the mistakes that they have made in the past together. One of the things she talked about with Olenna today was that with her parents, they modeled a pretty dysfunctional communication style for her. They would talk in subtext when they were friendly with one another — bland pleasantries about the day wrapped around what they were really sort of talking about, maybe stuff about how her dad wasn’t around enough. Nothing was direct and everything made her anxious because she was always waiting for the shoe to drop. She was always waiting for one wrong thing to be said and for her dad to snap at her mom, and then for her mom to start screaming about it.

She told Olenna she used to feel like her bedroom was a prison, because she had to stay in there and listen to her parents fight. And then the tension in the house would be so thick for hours afterward, maybe days. She would tiptoe around everyone for days. That was probably one of the things that exacerbated her predisposition toward anxiety and made it like, disordered.

“I hear you,” she says to him. “I guess I mean, what would you do, if you were in my shoes?”

“Ah,” he says, relaxing a little bit. “I feel like I kind of have been in your shoes. And I ended up grabbing coffee with Alayaya. She had gone through a divorce. She seemed sad and keen on being friends again. I was open to it. And now we are friends.”

Her voice is super quiet — because she is pretty ashamed and embarrassed that she’s about to say what she’s about to say. She softly asks, “There’s really not a part of you that worries I’m going to meet with this guy and fall in love with him and then leave you?”

“I mean, it’s in the back of my mind — but just like most far-fetched scenarios are in the back of my mind,” he mutters, breaking eye contact. “I think about all possibilities. And I feel like this is a very unlikely possible outcome.” And then, he raises his gaze back to her face. He says, “And if it happens, then it must mean that this —” he’s gesturing between the two of them, “— isn’t very strong. And if it actually isn’t very strong, then I’d rather just know. Sooner than later.”

 

 

  
She is not very subtle as she crams the takeout containers of leftovers into her fridge hastily. She is not very subtle as she takes his half-finished wine glass and just dumps it in the sink — amid his surprised protest. He tells her he was still working on that.

She’s standing in front of him as she asks, “What did you eat and drink today?”

He immediately says, “Not gluten.”

And then she reaches up to grab onto the back of his neck with both hands. She drags his face to hers. She smushes the front of her body into his as she groans and pushes her tongue into his mouth. He tastes like the dinner he just ate. She groans as he reacts, as his hands run up the backs of her thighs before he grabs onto her ass and squeezes, lifting her up just incrementally.

He’s just getting into the kissing and the groping when she starts dragging him backwards, towards her bedroom. He has the wherewithal to break away from her mouth to laugh — pressing his forehead against hers briefly, before he presses a rather innocent kiss against her lips. He quietly asks her, “Are you trying to prove something to me right now?”

She says, “No — yes.” And after a pause, she finally settles on, “No. I’m not proving it to you. I’m proving it to _myself._ Is that okay?”

He nods. “Uh, yeah.”

And then he lets go of her to go grab his bag. He needs his bag because that’s where the condoms are.

 

 

  
Sex ends up containing a lot of heavy conversation. As she straddles him on the bed and the both of them help her pull off her shirt, as she groans when his hands immediately go for her breasts, digging underneath the wires of her bra, she tells him that she honestly cannot imagine _this_ — the two of them — not being _real._ She gasps and he groans, as he smears the pads of his thumbs over her nipples. She’s grinding on him with her pants still on. She tells him, “God, just take it off. I don’t know why you always take so long to get us naked.”

He’s laughing breathily, as he reaches around to unclip her bra. He tells her that he barely waits. His wait time is a matter of minutes. He tells her that he waits because he’s still really anxious and nervous about being naked with her. He tells her that he also waits because he wants to drag it out and delay gratification sometimes.

She bites down on her bottom lip as she looks down at him through heavy-lidded eyes. She bites down a groan, and then whispers to him that what he just said was really sexy. “Not the anxiety bit,” she amends, really needlessly. “The delayed gratification bit.”

She takes off his shirt and pulls him up, so he is sitting on her bed, with her in his lap. She pulls him up so they can touch chests, nakedly. Her limbs go around him tightly in a hug, as he lifts her a little and repositions her so that they are both more comfortable. He’s cupping a breast with one hand, pressing wet kisses into her neck, and blindly reaching behind him for his bag.

She’s tilting her head so he has easy access to her skin. She slowly shuts her eyes and runs her hands up his spine and ribcage. She asks him, “How are you able to not be jealous — of the idea of me with someone else? I feel like I get jealous all the time. You with Alayaya. You with your intern. You with a bunch of random women I don’t even know yet.” She sort of starts answering her own question as he listens, as he continues kissing her neck. She tells him that she thinks the years of watching her dad cheat on her mom have done a number on her. She’s scared of infidelity. She’s also predisposed to thinking that certain things are romantic — like a man losing his shit because his woman’s skirt is too high and he thinks she’s just asking for it. Missy is a little predisposed to drama, even though she doesn’t like to think of herself this way. She tells him she’s been discovering a lot about herself, since she’s been with him.

She softly goes, “Oh,” as his hand, gloved, sneaks in between their bodies. He unbuttons her jeans and then pulls down the zipper.

And then he reaches around to pull down her pants a little bit, to uncover her ass and give himself better access to the rest of her, as he conversationally and frankly tells her that he’s not jealous because he’s a really secure person. It sounds hilariously like an inadvertent indictment of her lack of confidence — so she laughs about it, as he soothingly squeezes her butt to let her know he didn’t mean it like that.

The space is really tight and this isn’t an ideal angle, but he gets his hand in her pants, in her underwear. She goes rigid — expecting just an attack on her clit or something — but he just ends up leaving his hand in there, doing nothing.

She smiles at him. His face is so close to her that it’s blurry.

“I used to feel really jealous,” he tells her. “Maybe during high school. I was jealous of all of the other boys, even like, the unpopular ones that couldn’t get dates. Because I knew that eventually they’d meet a girl that likes them back, that they’d eventually have normal sex. I used to think that I’d prefer being like, overweight and below-average-looking — to what I was actually contending with. I felt jealous all the time of other people.”

“And then?” she prompts.

“I just got over it,” he says. Upon seeing her expression, he chuckles. He cups her face with his other hand. He says, “I don’t know what to tell you, babe. That’s what happened. I just got over making my lack of dick the biggest thing about me and my life. I just thought about it. Decided it was utterly stupid and ridiculous. I know I have other shit going for me besides a penis. Women live without penises all the time. And they are not being melodramatic and fatalistic as fuck about it. So I knocked it off.”

He tells her that Alayaya used to get really mad at him for — basically — not being a real man, for not defending her honor all the time when she was an asshole to a dude and that dude took offense, for not being more publicly romantic on holidays and anniversaries, for not being jealous. Grey tells Missandei that Alayaya is different now, and she also never articulated this to his face. He just read into it. He was always feeling like he wasn’t enough of a man for her because he didn’t embody whatever testosterone-based shit she was looking for, and also because he didn’t have a penis. And then she cheated on him with a guy with a dick. And that really hurt him and messed with how he felt about himself. So he didn’t bother dating anyone for real for years. He didn’t want to.

“Not until I met you, at least,” he says, leaning back a little to search her eyes.

Her heart is throbbing in her chest, in this pained yet still pleasurable way. She whimpers as she closes the distance between their faces, as she softly presses her lips against his.

The kissing goes from slow and exploratory to hard and desperate pretty quickly. All it takes is him opening his mouth, them touching tongues accidentally, and then her trying to unhinge her jaw to eat his entire face.

She starts squirming around, shifting her body so that she can get some direct contact with his hand in her pants and underwear. She smears herself against his fingers — she groans into his mouth — it is not enough, so she repeats. Harder. And then she groans again, this time in frustration.

When they break their mouths apart — gasping for air, chests rising and falling rapidly — she tells him, “I’m going to stop giving you shit for not being jealous enough. I’m being insecure because — I’m just afraid you don’t want me enough.”

His face looks sad for a moment — pained.

And then he gently nudges a finger inside her. It’s shallow, but it’s also very easy. She’s wet, soft, and warm. The action surprises her — she lets out this soft breathy sound right into his ear. His heart is pounding in his head. He says, “Do you really think I don’t want you enough? Like, I told you the other day I’m down to have babies with you. I’m down to cohabitate and save some cash money with you. What more do you want, Missandei? Do you want to share a bank account, too?” He is smiling. And kind of mocking her.

She groans again. She feels a little mortified as she says, “Oh my God.”

He pushes in a little deeper. He says, “How does it feel?”

She says, “It feels nice.” And then she giggles into the side of his head, over the very moderate understatement. Then she whispers, “Baby.”

 

 

  
She’s so embarrassed, but also so turned on. It occurs to her to tell him this, so she does. She tells him she feels embarrassed for inexplicable reasons. It just feels embarrassing to be so physically intimate with someone because this wasn’t a part of her life at all for the longest time. It feels embarrassing to go from no sex at all to like, sex. She tells him she doesn’t feel sexy very often — she feels self-conscious. She worries she’s not relaxed enough. The worry then makes her tense up. She whispers to him and tells him, “I worry that you are just waiting to get it over with, and I’m embarrassed that I’m not good at it and not sexy at all.”

Grey straight up says, “That’s fucking crazy, Missandei,” before he resumes slowly reinserting and rewithdrawing two fingers, shallowly, into her.

And then he lies and and speculates out loud that it will ease her embarrassment if she just watches what is going on. He gets her to pull her body away from his a little bit, to stop hiding what is going on from the light. He has her lean back on her hands, braced against the bed.

This is actually so he can get a better, easier angle and relax his wrist a little bit. He can tell this is going to take a while. He doesn’t want to quit from soreness and just obliterate her self-esteem later. He feels like she cannot handle the absolute truth right now, in this moment, so that’s why he is being careful to keep it casual.

He yanks down her pants a little more with his free hand.

Her butt bounces and drags. She squeaks out a sound. She looks down at her pelvis. She sees a blue glove. She sees how wet and shiny everything is because that is what her body is producing. She sees her own pubic hair. She sees her pants tightly cinched around her upper thighs. She sees her own boobs, just flopped over her ribcage. She feels and also sees his fingers smoothly going in and out of her.

She decides that, ahh, not sexy at all. It is actually more mortifying than before.

He’s watching her face. This is why he strategically says, “Baby, you feel fucking awesome. You are so fucking beautiful and sexy. I think about fucking your hot body all the fucking time.”

And then, Missandei really _does_ start to cry.

Missy starts crying because, by this point, she knows him probably better than anyone else on the entire planet. She knows his likes, dislikes, and communication preferences. She knows from his tone and his word choice is that he’s just saying things to reassure her — and she is apparently the kind of emotionally frail woman that needs to be told she’s beautiful and sexy and fuckable.

She also starts crying because she knows it’s a great way to get him to stop trying to have sex with her.

Sure enough, he is immediately alarmed and immediately extracts himself from inside of her. He crushes her to his body in a hug and his voice finally sounds authentic and real — and nervous and scared — as he asks, “Babe, what’s wrong? What happened? What did I do? Are you okay?”

 

 

  
She’s lying in her bed with her hair stowed away and with her teeth brushed. She is fully clothed in her pajamas. They have decided to call it good. They have decided to put a pause on their really hot streak of really orgasmic sexual activity.

His arm comes around her back as she softly confesses to him that she’s afraid that all of her worst fears about sex are actually coming true. She’s not good at it at all. She’s never been able to have good sex. She might be incapable of having good sex. She asks him, “Is this going to be the thing that eventually drives you away from me?”

He grabs her hand and squeezes it before he holds it tightly.

She asks, “Was sex with Alayaya better than what we are doing?”

He freezes. His pulse jumps, too.

“Grey?”

He shakes his head. He says, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this. I love _you._ I love being with _you._ Whatever I had with Alayaya is totally different and not relevant to _us.”_

“So that’s a yes,” Missy says flatly. “So sex with her was a lot easier and funner than sex with me. So I am the common denominator in the shitty sex we’ve been having.”

“I didn’t say that at all,” he says. “And that’s not true at all.”

“I know,” she says flatly. “I was joking.”

“Okay,” he says.

She sighs. And then she rolls over, so that her back is to him. And then she says, “Hey, I’m not shutting you out. I just want a little bit of space while we sleep tonight. Is that okay?”

He really can’t do much besides agree that it’s okay. He says, “Yeah, no prob, babe,” because it’s not like he can fucking force a woman to cuddle with him after _another_ round of bad sex. He grabs the edge of the blanket and lifts it higher over her shoulders. He asks, “Are you warm enough?”

She’s facing away from him — even though she would love to cuddle as she falls asleep — because she’s just crying again. She’s facing away from him so he doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to manipulate him into comforting her and telling her that she is great and perfect because she is clearly not either of those things.

She keeps her voice as clear as as normal as possible, as she says, “Yeah, I’m warm. Thanks.”

He feels awful. He feels like utter shit. He is scared that this is the beginning of the end, that this is the point in which he starts to lose her.

 

 

 

 

 


	66. Missy has a hot date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy, that champion, tries to do what she does best: research the shit out of her problems in order to solve them. She also goes on a date with another man, with Grey's blessing. Whaaat?

 

 

  
Missy has the distinction of accurately diagnosing herself with celiac at the age of 18, after years of unhealthy diets. Many of her female peers battled forms of body dysmorphia and dieted in order to fit into an ideal and attract boys. Missandei ate only oatmeal and celery for weeks at a time because those were two things she was sure wouldn’t leave her chained to a toilet. Her mom sometimes congratulated her for her willpower and her aversion to snacks. Her dad was absent and busy with work, mostly checking in to gruffly assess how fast and feminine she was maturing, to check how similar to her mother she was becoming.

Missy went through a stint of thinking she had irritable bowel syndrome, but didn’t quite feel right about that. After Calvin broke up with her, she dropped weight because of depression and dipped under 100 pounds. Her mother tried to force-feed her high calorie foods rich with wheaty carbs. She casually told her mother she wouldn’t mind dying — before embarking on a strict elimination diet. She got free reign over the computer and the internet, because she was freaking out her parents so badly.

In those days, there were message boards and online encyclopedias. Web infrastructure wasn’t as robust. It took a lot of hours of obsessive reading before she stumbled onto a study and a paper. Then after about half a year’s worth of missed periods and a specialist and a test, her autoimmune disorder was confirmed.

It’s this historical context that results in Missy pausing over a magazine rack with a paper cup of gas store coffee in her hand. Her lips are drawn together tightly and a quick glance around the store shows that she is currently the only customer and this might be her only chance to minimize embarrassment.

She reaches out and quickly picks off a bunch of women’s magazines that she normally doesn’t read because she is a feminist. She snatches up a copy of Cosmo, Marie Claire, Vogue, Elle — and then with her heart just throbbing in her neck — she also flicks forward black plastic sheets, revealing the bodies of scantily clad women. Missy also loads the latest issues of Playboy and Penthouse onto her stack.

Her face is on fire as she has the cashier — a man her father’s age, possibly a Summer Islander — ring up her purchases, including her steaming coffee cup.

She refrains from defending herself. She doesn’t tell him this is for research. She doesn’t make a joke. She assumes he’s a professional and people like her buy a stack of these magazines all the time.

The total cost is significantly higher than she expects. The bills in her hands aren’t enough, so she has to awkwardly dig around in her briefcase for her wallet, for her credit card.

 

 

  
She can’t do much with the stack of sex literature she has procured because her work day is hectic and there are people around her always. Her morning is filled with back-to-back meetings. Her lunch is a working lunch, at a client sight and presentation. Her afternoon is spent reviewing projects in a rush, in between phone calls with various vendors and contractors. She has to lug her briefcase around from meeting to meeting, teetering dangerously on her heels due to the weight imbalance.

When Tyrion asks her if Podrick can carry her bag for her, Missandei immediately says no — swiftly and almost angrily. Pod is an intern and also young and new, so he thinks he has done something wrong or that Missandei hates him. So he randomly apologizes to her, which makes her feel stupid and guilty.

She’s hugging her briefcase to her chest when her day is finally over, because the leather strap has been making her shoulder ache. She drives home with her stash innocuously sitting shotgun. She worries her bottom lip with her teeth as she fights through traffic. She starts to sweat through her light blouse as the clock ticks and ticks closer to six. She is going to be late.

She has half of her attention on the road and half of it on her phone as she tries to quickly cobble out a text message. She thinks to herself that it would serve her right if she just got into a serious fender bender that requires her to be dragged out of her car by EMTs, leaving an officer on the scene to examine the contents of her bag that fell apart in the collision. Her porn would just be scattered _everywhere,_ and the cop would surely know at least her father or one of her brothers. Gossip spreads like wildfire. Everyone would assume she has some sort of sex addiction instead of the ascertaining the truth — which, in her current twisted mind, might be just as bad as sex addiction.

During a pee break between her fourth and last meeting today, she fiddled on her phone and did some light reading. She Googled “I am bad at sex” on her phone during her pee break and went down this rabbit hole of men on reddit talking about how they can’t stand having sex with women who close their eyes during sex and are stiff as boards. She read about how men don’t like feeling like they are fucking corpses because they are not into necrophilia or feeling like they are rapists. She read with this manic concentration, trying to figure out if she had accidentally stumbled onto Grey’s secret reddit profile or something fucking mortifying like that.

She learned a few new terms. Pillow princess. Starfish.

She is a starfish. And because she might as well just deny all responsibility, she thinks that her being a starfish is all her parents’ fault — because they made her scared of sex and they also didn’t believe her when she told them she has food and bowel issues, which were obstructions in her ability to have sex without hangups in her younger days.

She is twenty minutes late when she finally makes it into the restaurant, with her hair a little wild and her parking pass clenched tight in her sweaty fist. She needs to validate that shit at the end of happy hour. Because she blew a lot of money today on magazines.

It’s more through his recognition of her that she remembers him. His face lights up when he sees her. He waves at her from his seat. Her heart is pounding in stress. She drags her fat briefcase along with her as she heads to the table, letting it smack against the side of her knee. She says, “Hey! Zinash?”

 

 

  
She is typically very terrible with men — all sorts of men — from the ones who are father figures to her or _her actual father_ — to the ones who display some sort of romantic or sexual interest in her.

She immediately observes that Zinash looks similar to how he used to look — but older. Zinash is still chubby. He is still a little dorky. He is still eager in a way that is off-putting to her — and she feels guilty about this. She is such a snob. She is so superficial.

She has no idea when to slip in that her mom is a lying bitch — that she actually isn’t available to date, that she is actually already in a relationship. She has no idea _how_ to say this to him, whether she should low-key just name-drop Grey and refer to him as her boyfriend or if she should just be blunt and straight up about it. Like, maybe she _really_ should just tell Zinash that her mom is a lying a bitch.

A complication in all of it is that Zinash is commandeering the conversation kind of blithely. He can’t detect her half-engagement. He reminisces a lot about the past and he refers to his own friends in high school, not completely registering the fact that they hung out in different crowds and she has no idea who he is referring to. He was an honor student, a band geek, and he was in some sort of science club.

She missed a lot of school because she was sick a lot. And when she managed to go to school, she kept her head down and was generally moony-eyed over a jock. She was a jock’s girlfriend.

“Do you remember Manny Tiango?”

Missy is like, “Uh, no.”

“You know Manny!” Zinash insists. “He was really funny and played trombone in jazz band.”

She awkwardly has to be like, “Um, I wasn’t in jazz band.”

And in spite of this auspicious opening, Zinash still thinks it’s a great idea to launch into a long-winded story about this one time Manny put a whoopie cushion underneath Mr. Villanueva's chair and it made a farting sound and cracked everyone up. Zinash says, “Manny was _hilarious.”_

Missandei sips from her martini — she is only allowing herself one drink so that she can safely drive later — and tries to make herself laugh at this non-story. But it comes out awkwardly and forced. Like, “Haaa!” before it dips into flat silence.

She can’t believe her mom would rather she date this guy instead of accepting that she is already with someone amazing that she loves.

The more time she spends with Zinash, the more tired she feels.

 

 

  
Because she is such a fucking coward and a fucking awkward dummy — and because Zinash is really stinging from his divorce still and feels optimistic for the first time in _months_ because he has actually forgotten how beautiful Missandei is — they never proactively air things out in a truthful manner.

It just all comes to a head when he insists on paying for her drink — and he insists on walking to her car.

She feels sick about it — because it feels all wrong. She feels like she is sort of cheating on Grey because she completely and moronically fell into a date with a dude. She feels like she is leading Zinash on because she is too afraid of just telling him the truth, which is that while he is a very nice man, she is just not interested in him in a more-than-friends way.

The last time she was caught in this sort of situation, she was sitting in her car with Grey in the middle of a rainy drizzle. It was romantic as fuck — in hindsight. She couldn’t freaking get herself to tell him how she was feeling inside because she is just so fucking terrible with men — so she froze up and acted like a _fucking starfish_ when he kissed her.

This time, next to her car, she is the teeniest bit wiser.

Like — she sees the kiss coming.

Like — her reflexes are quick enough for her to release out this alarm from her throat. She makes a noise that sounds like, _“Agh!”_ which startles Zinash into freezing.

And, a little grief-stricken, Missy says, “Ah, I’m sorry!”

 

 

  
Grey tries to remind Drogo that he shares walls with neighbors, and thus, they cannot blast music as loud as they want. Grey has to shout over the bass to be heard — that’s how inconsiderate Drogo is. But it is all pointless. Drogo acts like he doesn’t hear Grey at and all. He just resumes fiddling around with Grey’s fireplace.

Tal is trying to do some conversion on his phone in the kitchen, all the while muttering. He is jokingly annoyed that Grey only has gelatin powder, not gelatin sheets. He calls Grey an animal.

Grey is up to his elbows in a hot flour paste, trying to knead it as he continues to shout at Drogo to lower the volume.

Yara is holding a glass of red wine and dancing in the middle of his living room by herself.

This is the scene that Missandei haggardly walks into. She nudges open his front door after unlocking it and then drags her tired ass into his apartment. She’s absently shout-asking him why he has music going on so loudly — with her briefcase clenched in her hands — when she freezes, startled. She didn’t expect for him to have company.

“Babe!” Yara says, grinning widely, her mouth stained purple with wine. “You’re here!”

 

 

  
Somehow their wires got crossed. She thought she was coming over for a sleepover tonight. And he didn’t expect that at all. He thought he was having dinner with some friends. He helplessly holds up his hands, which are full of dumpling dough made of wheat flour — and he says, “Uh, I didn’t realize you were coming over?”

“We talked about it this morning,” she tells him patiently. The stereo is off now — so that their friends can just _easily eavesdrop._

He quizzically says, “We did?”

She doesn’t want to say, out loud in front of his friends, what they talked about in the morning because it’s personal. But what happened — to the best of her recollection — is that she woke up in bed with him and then apologized for the night before. He told her there’s nothing to apologize for, as he got up and started dressing himself. He told her it was all good. She was like, whoa, what kind of mind game are you playing here? She followed him into his closet and watched him get dressed. She tried to make out with him while he was putting his shirt on. He kissed her back like there was a gun held to his head and then thanked her. Like, he thanked her for the morning kiss. And then he patted her on the butt. And then he went to go look for a tie. And then she hollered at him that they should get together later. She remembers him saying, “Sure, babe.”

And then she felt really insecure about all of it and followed him out of the door as he locked up behind then. And then she went to a gas station to fill up and to buy some porn and some women’s magazines with sex advice articles because she is pretty sure she can life-hack this just like she life-hacked her celiac all those years ago.

Evenly, out loud, Missy says, “There must’ve been a miscommunication.” In her head and in her heart, she knows that this is all his fucking fault.

He quickly wets his lips by licking them. He holds up his fists full of flour again — as if she has forgotten. He looks bewildered. He says, “Uh, have you had dinner yet? Because you can’t eat this. Shit, I think I have like, some salad or some other stuff I can make for you after I like, get this shit off my hands.”

 

 

  
She tells him not to even worry about it. She tells him not to stress. She pours herself a glass of organic wine and she just leaves him in the kitchen to buddy around with Tal and Drogo. She generally gives him the impression that she’s like, a big girl who can take care of herself. Besides, she’s constantly at his place and there’s stashes of gluten-free snacks and food items all over. She even has a dedicated toaster oven here.

She one-handedly drags her fat briefcase into his bedroom and does her best to awkwardly throw that thing on his bed. She has so many regrets right now. Today was a bad day for an impulse buy. She should’ve been upfront with Zinash because now his feelings might be a little hurt. She should call her mother and tell her mother to stop being such a fucking psycho.

She kicks off her shoes and strips off her work clothes, momentarily storing her wine glass on the flat edge of his tub when Yara suddenly walks into his bathroom.

Missandei screams this high-pitched shriek as her hands automatically reach out to grab the wall protectively as well as shield her naked breasts.

Her scream is loud enough that Grey rushes into the bathroom just a second later, his eyes wild, hands clean, and a streak of flour running down his navy shirt. He is saying, “What? What? What? Is everyone okay?” as he looks searchingly at Yara’s own shocked expression and Missandei’s cowering body.

Missy is still covering her boobs and her heart is still slamming in her chest as she straightens up, as she swallows the spit in her mouth and says, “Yara, you scared me.”

“Ah,” Yara says, actually managing to sound contrite. “I didn’t realize you were changing. Sorry. I just came in here to chat.”

Grey releases a long sigh, shaking his head. He mutters, “You guys scared _me,_ holy shit. I thought we had another rat situation or something.” And then with that — he turns around and leaves, as Missandei just stares at his retreating back silently.

Yara gives Missy a little privacy as Missy burrows around Grey’s closet and pulls out a few items of his clothing. Yara helps Missy roll up the sleeves of his sweatshirt before pressing Missandei’s wine glass back into her hand.

Yara says, “What a treat to see you tonight. Didn’t expect to. He told us we wouldn’t be seeing you ‘cause you had a hot date.” Yara gives her a sardonic smile. “How did your hot date go?”

 

 

 

 


	67. Missy and Yara read porn together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy shows Yara — who was totally friends with Missy first before Yara was friends with Grey so dibs! — her stash of porn. They do some light reading before dinner. Then, Grey wants to go to sleep but Missy would rather have sex before sleeping. How are they going to problem-solve this?!

 

 

  
Grey, Drogo, and their chef friend Tal all like to make food that takes like, three hours to prepare — and they act like this is reasonable and normal, especially on a weeknight with a start time of like, six.

Yara grumbles that, at this rate, they won’t eat until _just_ before her bedtime. Missy leans forward on the couch, offering Yara her box of rice crackers and some hummus. Yara snags a few crackers and nibbles on the corners of them as she throws dirty looks at the men in the kitchen. They are mostly fiddling with bamboo steamer baskets and just ignoring the shit out of her.

“You look so cozy and comfy,” Yara observes, turning back to Missy and jutting her chin out, gesturing to the blanket that Missandei has spread over their legs, gesturing to Missy’s curls getting smushed underneath the hood of Grey’s sweatshirt, yet still peeking out and framing her face — gesturing to Missy’s washed, bare face — gesturing to how well Missandei just seems to fit into Grey’s space. Yara says, “I’m jealous.”

“Oh!” Missy breathes. “Do you want to slip into his clothes, too? I can go grab some for you! They are really comfortable! We can pretend we are slumber partying until dinner is ready.”

Yara suppresses a smile — she thinks Missandei is being so cute. She tells Missandei, “Thank you, but no thanks. That’s okay.” Her head is lolling against the back of the couch as she looks up at the ceiling. She’s grinning as she tells Missy that it’s funny that Missy is offering up her man’s clothes to his guests. She yawns exaggeratedly as she observes that all of the wine is making her a little sleepy.

Slouching deeply on the couch, with their elbows hooked together, Missy stifles her own yawn too — it’s probably a sympathetic yawn. She mumbles that they can have a little power nap before Yara’s dinner, if they want.

Yara whispers that she doesn’t believe in power naps, this far-reaching callback to college and the all-nighters that she used to pull because she had bad study habits.

Missy remembers the inside joke, so Missy quietly giggles and says, “Oh yeah.”

They talk about almost flunking art history together. They talk about their summer road trip to Dorne. They talk about Yara’s experiments with recreational drugs and how hysterical Missandei used to get about that. And during a short lull in the conversation, Missy sips the last bit of wine from her glass and, a little loopily, asks if she can tell Yara a secret.

Yara softly asks, “What is it?”

Missy looks pretty serious as she whispers, “I purchased a good amount of porn today. It’s in my bag right now.”

Yara breathes out a soft and short laugh — because like — what is this? She is chuckling as she says, “What?”

 

 

  
Missy generally resists getting too personal with Yara because, well, first off, Yara hates it. Yara has always hated other people’s soft feelings and the inconvenience she feels when she has to deal with how uncertain and ambiguous feelings can be. This is why the roles of her two best friends have been demarcated. Dany is for long talks and advice-giving. Yara is for a good time.

Secondly, over the past year, Yara and Grey have gotten close — close enough that it actually feels like Grey’s place in Yara’s life has superseded Missy’s. Like, the two of them hang out by themselves all the time. Missy hasn’t had a one-on-one with Yara in forever. Like, Yara knows all of these intimate details about Grey’s life. She holds all of these private anecdotes about his youth, stories that even Missy hasn’t heard yet.

Missy has resisted making a thing out of this — she has resisted feeling jealous or feeling left out or feeling like she’s not cool enough to keep Yara. But through Yara’s friendship with Grey, Missy has concluded that Yara _must be_ fully capable of dealing with someone else’s feeling in a sensitive and thoughtful way. And it’s only really the quality of Missy’s idiot problems that maybe Yara has an aversion to.

In Grey’s bedroom, sitting cross-legged on his bed, Missy drags her briefcase into her lap and opens the flap. And then she gingerly starts unloading the magazines, her face warm from the hood of his sweatshirt containing all of her head heat — and also because she is feeling embarrassed and bashful.

Yara picks up the Playboy and flips it open to a random page. She nudges her butt onto the edge of the bed. She says, “Okay, so this is different from what I was thinking when you said you purchased porn — but no, you right. This is porn you’ve got here.”

Missy nods as she tries to artfully arrange the magazines on the bed — because she lacks having something else to do.

Yara is still flipping pages as she asks, “Why did you buy these things?”

“For the articles.”

It sounds so earnest and so cute and so Missy-like that Yara laughs in delighted surprise, because of course Missy bought Penthouse for the articles.

Missy is rubbing at her hot cheeks with both of her hands. Her palm is kind of muffling her confession accidentally — but probably subconsciously on purpose — as she quietly says, “I think I’m like, pretty bad at sex.”

 

 

  
Yara shows Missy the difference between Playboy and Penthouse by flipping to the center spreads and showing Missy pictures of naked white women in provocative poses. Yara says that there are basically no money shots in Playboy. Yara half-smiles at Missy’s extreme attentiveness as Yara carelessly explains dumb shit that she has picked up about porn mags based on the years she and her brother secretly raided their dad’s stash in his truck.

Yara lies back on Grey’s bed, with a double layer of pillows propping up her head. She flips to a sex advice article and shows it to Missandei, who is lying down right next to her. Yara tells Missandei that she sincerely doubts that Missy is that bad at sex.

To which Missy says, “You don’t know that. You don’t see what I’m doing during sex.”

“True,” Yara admits. “But, motherfucker, look at you and how eager to please you are, buying problematic, unfeminist porn and then carrying it around all day like it’s a live bomb. You’ll be okay, and he’s very lucky to have you.”

Missy rests her head on Yara’s shoulder as they read some articles together. Yara tells Missy that Penthouse is famous for its letters, which are totally works of pure fiction written by horny, boring straight men. They read about a guy who haplessly fell into a threesome with his wife and her really hot, really young coworker, both of whom took turns pleasuring the dude in an elevator. Yara sarcastically mutters to Missandei that this stuff definitely happens all the time in real life.

Cosmo attempts to be woke, so Yara avidly searches for the article about the basics of lesbian sex so that she can make fun of it or be pleasantly surprised by it.

It’s a combo of both. She points out pictures to Missy and tells Missy what things she’s done or tried and what positions are just dumb or awkward or not worth the pay off to her.

And then kind of randomly, Yara says, “Have you ever considered that maybe _he_ is bad at sex, and it’s actually not just you?”

Missy shakes her head against Yara’s shoulder. She says, “No, I know it’s not him. He’s great and wonderful.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re stupid-in-love right now. Just wait until you guys move in together and start arguing about shit like whether or not there’s a draft coming through the window, which will lead to a conversation about ghosts and whether or not you believe in ghosts. And you will discover that your partner is fucking actually agnostic about ghosts and is like, ‘Well, it hasn’t been proven that ghosts _don’t_ exist.’ And you’re like, ‘Bitch, of course they don’t exist. What the fuck, are you stupid?’” Yara chuckles. “Just wait, Missy.”

“He told you we’re moving in together?” Missy asks softly.

“Yeah,” Yara says, throwing out the syllable like it’s a blunt instrument. She flips the page to a sex quiz. “Gotta pen?”

 

 

  
When the dumplings are all assembled and the water is vigorously boiling, Grey tells the guys that he’s gonna go fetch Yara and Missandei real quick. It is actually past nine o’clock, and this entire thing seemed like a brilliant idea like, six hours ago. Now it’s just a tiring trudge past the finish line.

He finds Yara and Missandei cuddled up together in his bed. He also sees a bunch of magazines — of naked women? — strewn around their bodies.

He immediately gets what is happening. Because this is Missandei here. He immediately realizes that her mind has gone nuts because of the other night — and he frowns. He doesn’t comment on all of the porn for this reason. He doesn’t further stigmatize it. He just says, “Hey, dinner’s ready soon, Yara.” And to Missandei, he says, “You okay with like, a potato with olive oil and salt?”

She’s disentangling herself from Yara and is scooting off the bed. She says, “Ooh, that sounds really yummy actually.”

Yara claps her hand on his shoulder as she walks past him, into the living room.

In the brief moment that he and Missandei are alone together, he reaches out and gently pulls her into his body in a loose hug. He can’t kiss her because he’s been eating test dumplings, so he sniffs the side of her head and runs his hand over her butt. He laughs a little bit into her ear as he looks at the glossy open pages on his bed. He tells her, “Oh, we’re gonna talk about this later. You look cute in my clothes, by the way.”

“I look cute out of your clothes, too,” she says back to him, sort of trying to be sexy, but her voice is actually soft and sweet and a touch insecure.

That makes him laugh again, into the side of her head. He says, “Yeah, you do.”

 

 

  
Drogo spends dinner inhaling the food and also talking about how much it must suck for Missandei to _be Missandei._ He has masticated steamed pork dumplings in his mouth as he tells Missy that it must suck for her to watch other people eat delicious food that she can’t all the time. He tells her that he would probably kill himself if he couldn’t eat wheat. Like, that would mean giving up pasta, giving up bread — bread is so fucking good — giving up like, cakes and lots of desserts, too. Drogo says, “Holy fuck, I’m so glad I’m not gluten intolerant. I would put a gun to my head. Swear to God.”

Grey is laughing and trying to shove at Drogo, to clue Drogo in on his extreme insensitivity under the thin veil of being sensitive. Grey looks at her from across the table with his eyes lit up, forcefully trying to contain his amusement enough to say with a straight face, “She likes her potato just fine. Don’t you, baby? I slaved over that potato like, for four entire minutes.”

She thinks that he’s so fucking cute, and she can barely handle it. Missy thinks that he’s so fucking cute _all the time._

And before she can answer him, Tal interjects and says, “I actually tried to talk him into dressing it up. Like, maybe fry up some prosciutto and sage leaves for you in the leftover pork fat — but Grey was insistent. He was pissed that we are already eating so late. He was adamant about a cooking cut-off time. So he threw the potato in the microwave — he wouldn’t even bake it! — and he was like, ‘Don’t coddle her! Don’t coddle her! She will eat a fucking nuked potato, and she will like it!’”

 

 

  
He’s yawning as he firmly shuts the door beyond Drogo, behind the last of their friends. His kitchen is a disaster zone, and it bugs the shit out of him, but he has to clean it later rather than now.

Tiredly, he nudges her into the direction of the bedroom.

They carry out their bathroom routine quickly.

And then, when his mouth is clean, he collapses next to her in bed. He groans and pulls her body over and on top of his, as he fuses their mouths into a kiss that is wet, firm, and full of grateful sighing. He is chuckling a little bit against her mouth, as a hand sneaks underneath the sweatshirt she is wearing, pressing flat to her stomach, before travelling up.

She can see and also feel when he realizes she’s not wearing a bra. He breaks the kiss and pulls away, so he can watch her face. His brows furrow a little bit — as he silently mouths, “Okay,” and starts rubbing his palm against the swells of her breasts, alternating between them, kind of playing around with them — also trying to give them equal amounts of love and attention.

And then he says, “Miss. You’ve had quite the day, haven’t you?”

 

 

  
He tries to make it clear to her that he’s too tired for sex. He’s been on his feet all day, and his body is like, actually tired from being inert and upright.

He apologizes for being too tired for sex. He presses kisses into the curve of her neck and he tells her that he’s gonna pass out in about ten minutes probably — sorry.

They are under the covers, and he’s pressed against her back and he’s still got his hand underneath the sweatshirt, palming her breast in comfort. His voice is soft and low and kind of gravelly, as he asks her if she thinks she’s gonna get too hot during the night. Maybe she should change into a t-shirt?

She answers him by wordlessly shaking her head. She already likes how much she likes being ensconced in his smell and his soft fabrics. What is icing on the cake is how into it _he_ is, how he looks at her both with softness and also with a really appealing streak of possessiveness because it’s so out of character for him.

She scoots back a little bit, purposefully pressing her underwear-clad bottom into his crotch. She kind of pretends it’s accidental — kind of acts casual about it. She’s not being shy or nervous as much as she wants to give him a lot of opportunity to politely and kindly reject her advances — because maybe he really _is_ too tired for this.

She feels the rumble of his groan against her spine — it makes her freeze and her heart speeds up. He feels her stiffen — and he’s freezing behind her, too.

They are both kind of rigidly spooning each other, with his hand placidly holding onto her boob. She’s holding her breath as her mind runs in a million different directions. She’s thinking that this is almost _exactly_ like the time she tried to put her ass on his crotch — on the couch — it’s _exactly_ like the time she tried to sit on him. And that didn’t go well — it only resulted in a lot of mortification and shame for both of them so OMG, are they about to repeat that right now?

Missandei is thinking that she is being such a fucking slut right now. A really haughty and arrogant slut who read a few porn articles and has subconsciously taken inspiration from sexual fiction that doesn’t care about women’s pleasure in a realistic way and he _saw_ her entire stash of porn and when he saw it, his face was all like, WTF?

Right now, he is probably thinking that she is an idiot who read a Penthouse letter that started like this and she is trying to recreate it — _so fucking embarrassing —_ because that’s how basic she is. She should actually be the kind of woman that can say these things out loud. She really should aspire to be the kind of truthful woman who gets told by her partner that he’s too tired for sex and she can be just like, oh, but I want to have sex? Is that okay? It has nothing to do with all of the porn I have read, by the way. That is just a terrible coincidence.

Instead of this passive shit.

She’s about to blurt out something weird, probably something that has nothing to do with sex in order to deflect from the embarrassment she feels because she’s so awkward at this still —

But then she feels his hand clench around her boob all hard, before he actually _presses_ and lightly smears himself against her soft butt.

She actually says, “Whoa.”

He laughs quietly behind her — like, he’s really laughing. She can feel his hot breath on the back of her neck.

Burning heat prickle and bloom across her cheekbones. She’s biting down on her bottom lip — as her pulse throbs hotly in her head. She glides her hand up to her chest cover his — she’s pressing down on his knuckles, over the material of the sweatshirt. She reaches around with her other hand, clamping it behind the back of his neck, arching a little with the motion.

He mutters, “Oh shit,” as he starts rubbing her soft skin. He says, “Okay.”

He is actually saying yes to sex, yes to her subtle solicitation — because fuck yeah, why the fuck not — this is _awesome._  
  
But she’s often an idiot in bed, so his okay sounds entirely too ambiguous, even as her body starts melting underneath the touching, even as she instinctively presses back against him again and he releases a sigh in response to it.

It takes her a minute or two — a minute of heavy breathing, blanket-shuffling, cool air hitting her stomach as his arm shifts her shirt up, as his other hand tracking goosebumps up and down the side of her thigh, and the soft and slow and firm grind of him against the cushion of her butt.

As they sync up on the rhythm of that, his blunt nails dig into her skin. He groans. And then he laughs again, this low amused, disembodied chuckle that flows into her ear.

She pauses because it’s really easy to psych her out. She says, “Oh my God, why are you laughing?”

He snickers as his hand grabs hard on her hip and then guides her body, resuming the nice and hot friction. He says, “I’m just in disbelief, is all,” and before she can nuttily ask him to expand on that thought, he releases another groan. He says, “Your fucking body.” He quietly laughs again. He quietly understates. “I’m a fan of it.” Then he adds, “I’m not laughing at you. Obviously I’m not laughing _at you_. I’m laughing ‘cause I didn’t think we’d be doing this tonight. I didn’t expect you tonight at all.”

“We can stop,” she says, as her heart throbs in her throat. “You can go to sleep like how you originally wanted.”

He chuckles. His hand is clawing and stretching her underwear, holding the material at her hip in his palm. He says, “Okay. We can do that. We can just stop and go to sleep? Is that want you want do?”

“Is that what _you_ want to do?” she asks back.

“Is that what you want?” he repeats, as he messily grinds himself in the warm, soft, pillowy, firm dip of where her ass cheeks meet. He’s just being sloppy now.

“What do you want to do?”

He smiles into the back of her head, into the smooth material of her head covering. He’s smiling because the question is just so dumb. He says, “Okay, let’s put a pin in this and go to sleep. It’s late.”

She is like, _“What!”_

And then he shoves his hand into her panties.

And then she says, “Oh my God,” as she throws her head back. “You’re an asshole.”

He says, “No, _you’re_ an asshole.” She’s really wet — aroused. And when he realizes the magnitude of this, he lets out this really guttural sound from deep in his throat. She echoes the same kind of sound as his teeth slowly latch into the back of her neck — and he bites down.

 

 

 


	68. Grey is scared of good sex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The morning after good sex, Missy is flying high. Grey is in a mood about it. Because he doesn't think he deserves nice things in life.

 

 

 

  
So, emboldened and now drunk on sexual arrogance — he is so obviously into her — Missandei wantonly tells him that she actually wants to have sex tonight, while his hand is already in between her legs, stretching out her panties. She still prone to euphemism, so she still says, “I want to do it tonight.” But what is notable is that she is _declaring._ “We’re gonna do it right now.”

And Grey is shaking his head and is like, “No shit we’re doing it right now, Missandei,” as he extracts his wet fingers, as he lets go of her breast, as he retreats from her soft, warm ass. He rolls over onto his back as she protests with a whimper.

She hisses, “Where are you _going!”_

What he’s doing is that he’s palming around in his nightstand for a latex glove. He snaps at her. He says, “I’m being fucking responsible! Hold on!”

She is mollified by this. She says, “Oh.”

And then he says, “I’m back,” as he rolls over and puts everything back to where it was except for the hand in between her legs. He sneaks the other hand back under the sweatshirt, realizing now how humid and tacky it is down there — she’s hot and sweating — and he roughly runs his fingers and his palm back and forth across her chest as his mouth sucks on the back of her perfumed neck.

She arches again.

Her ass smears against his crotch.

He groans at the contact, breathing hot air on the back of her wet neck.

She says, “Oh, God,” as she repeats the motion, as she starts breathing audibly and hard again, as she slowly grinds out some more friction in between their bodies.

The sheets on the bed keep rustling as their bodies swish the bedding around. He thinks that the way she is breathing — the sucking push and pulls of quick gasps — is so sexy. She thinks the way he is failing to hold all of his aggression at bay — him pinching her nipples hard under the shirt, all the biting — is really sexy. They largely keep pretty quiet, save for the occasional disbelieving grunt and groan, as they keep doing this really fun, new activity.

She feels like she’s suffocating — in a good way — it is so hot.

She is ecstatically surprised by a few things. She is surprised that he is so responsive and sensitive and maybe it’s because he drank a beer at dinner — but he is so sexually confident in his responsiveness. Every time their bodies connect firmly — she finds herself tearing up and breaking into fresh sweat as he groans loudly and grinds into her — and this _feels_ like _sex_ — it feels like mutually enjoyable sex.

She is _really_ into how fucking _needy_ he sounds and how it’s apparent that he wants this and how he wants her. She loves the deep and dark sounds he makes. She loves the heat emanating off him. She loves the way he says bad words — every fucking thing he says sounds so dirty. She loves how he licks and kisses her in apology after he sinks his teeth into her.

She is also thinking about how much better this would be if they were just fucking naked and skin to skin. She is thinking how great this would be if they weren’t wearing any clothes.

Her hand is clenched around the hem of her sweatshirt and she’s got it half pulled up her chest, her stomach fully exposed — when he stops her. His gloved hand is tight and strong on her wrist. His other hand is grabbing onto her boob really hard that it almost hurts. His entire body is tense behind her. And he says, “No, leave it on,” as he drags the warm, thick material back down her body, hotboxing her inside his own sweatshirt. He says, “I want it on for now. I like you in my clothes.”

She groans. She says, “But I’m getting so sweaty.”

He simply says, “That’s okay.”

And she whimpers at that. Her head rolls back. She bites her lip. She thinks that this motherfucker is just _so fucking ho_ t, as she just breaks out into another layer of sweat as he continues manipulating her breast and grinding into her ass and breathing his damp hot breath around her face.

She says, _“God.”_

He says, “Say my name.”

She is like, “What?”

“Say my name for me,” he repeats.

She is shaking her head in disbelief again, because who _is_ this person? She says, “Oh my _God.”_

“Baby, say my name,” he says softly. “So I know this is real.”

She twists her head to kiss him — messily, dirtily, at a bad angle that leaves a wet saliva trail across her cheek. She kisses him because she wants more, and what they currently are doing and what they currently have with each other is not enough. She kisses him because of course this is real.

He laughs when they have to pull away — to breathe. She gasps loudly and then arches her back and comprehensively presses back against him. He grinds out this approval — he hugs her body tighter to his chest. He says, “Baby —”

“Oh my God, _shut the fuck up,”_ she says in a rush, her eyes shut tightly. “You’re so annoying . . . _Grey.”_

“Say my real name.”

This time, she’s the one who bursts out laughing, her body shaking from it.

For a few moments right then — the sex quickly transitions from something hot and heavy and delirious to something warm and fond and sweet. He smiles as she laughs. He presses his nose into the edge of her jaw as his arms encircle her chest and traps her arms down at her sides. He kisses her salty skin as she tries to stop the sudden giggling.

He whispers to her that he loves her.

And that’s the thing that yanks the laughter right out from inside of her. She slows down to a soft sigh. She licks her lips. She grabs onto his hand as best as she can. And then she tells him that she loves him, too.

And then they simultaneously resume sex, effortlessly and seamlessly.

He has been coy, with his gloved hand on her hip. He resists and fights her a little bit, when she tries to pull him in between her legs again. She rubs her bare legs together under the covers — they are burning up, too — as she tries to get some relief for the nice, glowing ache. She says, “Please.”

He says, “Please what?”

She shakes her head — she’s smiling — and she’s also shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re _such_ an asshole. How did I not notice this before?”

“Oh, you did,” he says in a deadpan. “You have def noticed this before and even yelled at me a few times about it. But sex is in your brain right now, and it’s making you stupid.”

She laughs, loudly and delightedly. She says, _“Grey,”_ all scandalized, because he really shouldn’t be calling her stupid — as much as she loves it in this context.

He’s laughing, too. He kisses her on the side of her neck — in the hollow — very sweetly and gently. He quietly says, “You’re really fun right now.”

“You’re really hot right now,” she retorts.

“Oh, um. Thanks?”

She says, “Come on. Be nice to me.”

He says, “Be nice to you — _how?”_ as he actually reaches down and pulls her knee up so that there’s a gap in between her legs, so she can’t wiggle around so much, also so she can’t get away with not asking for what she wants explicitly. “Like, I already made you dinner. I already lent you the clothes that you stole out of my closet. I already stacked all of your reading material next to your bag so that you can continue your research tomorrow. Like, what more do you want from me?”

She mutters, “Oh my God, I’m going to kick your ass later.”

“Okay,” he says, smiling at the thought of her trying.

 

 

  
So he does relent eventually. He does get his hand back in between her legs, over her underwear though. She is burning hot — damp and wet — he can smell her — her thighs clamp down and trap his hand right away. And then she starts to grind into that.

And he is like, “Oh, fuck,” about it.

Privately and independently, he has come to his own conclusions about their sex life. She sometimes gets too in her head. He needs to help her stay out of her own head. Perhaps this entails shutting the fuck up and not rambling during sex. Maybe this also entails not getting too physically intimate about sex until she’s asking for it. Maybe it will help her feel in control if she can actually have a say over the journey it takes.

Her vague begging is unexpected though. She keeps saying please — her soft feminine voice airy and sweet — and it’s really just messing with his mind. The thing that the sound of her whining voice does for his ego is kind of crazy. It drags out this physical response, this visceral response. His mouth actually salivates and he has to fight the urge to just straight up hurt her and own her, with his teeth sinking into her skin.

She starts getting louder and her sounds get sexier, when he sneaks a few fingers back underneath the edge of her underwear, when he experimentally swipes his fingertips through her.

He’s stunned at how fucking wet — how _into this_ she is tonight — as he super carefully starts exploring tactically down there.

He mentally screams at himself to go slow so that she has time to get used to this. He’s screaming at himself to stay the fuck away from her clit until she asks for it. He vows to himself that he won’t mess with that area until maybe she just comes right out and asks him to touch her there — because sometimes she gets a little awkward and weird when sex advances too fast.

What he doesn’t expect though is how fucking distracting and inspiring and hot the sound and feel and touch of her squirming body is. He doesn’t expect for the way she moves and the way she talks to him and the way she gasps his name — repeatedly now — to fucking influence him the way that it does. He doesn’t expect to feel so dumb and so lost and so deep in it. He doesn’t expect to lose track of time and also of what he is doing and what she is doing — what they are both doing together. He doesn’t expect for her to feel as good as she does and for it is be as easy as it is.

They are not synced up here — because of the continuing newness of sex — and because it’s been so long since he’s been with someone like this — and she is just so _hot_ — and so his dumb body is trying to disconnect itself from his brain. He is basically barreling toward an orgasm.

So his hand leaves her body. He smears a wet hand print across her flat stomach as he holds her tightly and he holds her still. His voice is gruff and low and tortured as he croaks out, “Oh, goddamn, we need to stop.”

“What? _Why?”_ she says. He can feel her pounding heart underneath his palm. He can feel the shallow up and down of her quick gulps of air.

“We should talk about this —”

_“What?”_

“I don’t want just want to come against your ass without talking —”

“Whoa —”

“Yeah, see? It’s rude. I’m sorry —”

“No, no! Do it. It’s cool!”

“What?” And then he thinks about it. And then he says, “Fuck, are you _serious?”_

“Yeah, I'm serious. It’s _totally_ fine.”

“Oh my God.”

Her skin burns even more, as his entire body seizes behind and around her, as his hands clench aggressively and violently — around her breast and in between her legs. He spasms, swears some more, and groans as her heart pounds in her chest and her eyes start tearing up.

 

 

  
When Grey comes back down to Earth and realizes that it’s way past midnight and he just came in his boxers, against her poor, defenseless ass, he lets his tense body finally relax in weariness. He mutters, _“Motherfucker,”_ burying the syllables into the pillow. And then he quietly gripes, “I like how I just busted a nut in your butt. That was _romantic.”_ He lets her go kind of unceremoniously. He pushes himself up into sitting position. He finds himself getting so ticked off at himself for mindlessly letting things get way out of hand because he — metaphorically — can’t fucking keep it in his pants.

He snaps off glove from his hand in annoyance and holds the thin latex in his tight fist.

She rolls over so that she can finally look at him. She says, “I mean, the way you articulated that was real romantic.”

He clears his throat. “Sorry, Miss.”

And here, she softly smiles at him. “Don’t be sorry. That was actually really fun,” she says, with the kind of genuineness that results in him cutting eye contact.

He lightly clicks the tip of his tongue behind his teeth before he sighs. He mutters, “Ah, I gotta go clean myself up. I’m disgusting right now.”

And he’s on his feet and retreating to the bathroom before she can correct him, before she can tell him that he’s actually not disgusting at all.

 

 

Awesome. Her man is being mega weird like how he likes to get after moments of deep intimacy. Super awesome.

She’s used to his shift in mood enough that she can find it within herself to actually feel kind of annoyed — rather than purely sympathetic — about it. She is thinking that he is being lame right now. She doesn’t get any post-coital cuddling or smoochies because he’s so freaking lame and so adorably awkward about being vulnerable. He also totally forgot about how she didn’t even get a chance to even try to orgasm at all because he’s all up in his feelings right now — which, again, lame. But it’s also kind of really cute. It’s also kind of a relief because her track record there has been so terrible and what she likes about what they just did was how low-pressure it was.

So, she is just currently lying _in it_ because he commandeered the bathroom carelessly and shut the door on her. It’s like he doesn’t remember or realize that there’s a swatch of slippery wetness on her ass, probably a combination of sweat and . . . also probably his ejaculation. It’s like he doesn’t remember messing around in her underwear just minutes ago and how easily and effortlessly his fingers slid in and out of her. She can smell the cloud of musky sex all around her. She is trying not to move her legs because she doesn’t want to ickily smear stuff further down her thighs. She is already a mess halfway down her thighs. She has to wipe herself down — probably from front to back — and change her underwear. Like, he _must_ realize that he isn’t the only one with fluids in his pants.

As she gingerly stands up, she can feel more of it dripping out of her — and it’s a completely new and foreign feeling and sensation. It’s not like pee. It’s thicker. It’s not like something she’s ever experienced before, honestly. She has to squeeze her thighs tightly together to keep the discharge in as she leans against the wall, as she crosses her arms over her chest and squeezes her torso in comfort, too. She listens to the faucet run on the other side of the bathroom door, as she patiently waits for her turn. She cannot believe this motherfucker is taking his sweetass time right now.

Her annoyance completely melts away when he opens the door — his face aghast when he sees her. He immediately says, “Miss, I’m so sorry! I’m an ass!” before he ushers her into his brightly lit bathroom.

 

 

  
He finds that, for him, it just might currently be harder to be in a relationship than it was being alone.

He has to force himself not to shut himself off to her after sex, for instance. He has to make a conscious effort to open his arms out to her and let her hold onto him tightly as her breathing evens out and she falls asleep with her limbs thrown over him, anchoring him down. He stays awake for an indeterminable amount of time after that — hot, uncomfortable, weighted down underneath her cheek.

He ends up sleeping fitfully once he does manage to relax enough to get there. He wakes up a little bit because of his alarm, and then because her warm hands are running up and down his chest and ribcage and her mouth is pressed against his cheek.

He’s quiet and drowsy as he gets ready for work — a little introspective. She keeps sneaking looks at him and smiling bashfully when he catches her. His heart keeps throbbing, enough for him to tear his eyes away so he can recenter himself. What he sees in her face are all of these strange and anxiety-inducing beats of like, unconditional acceptance.

She is staring at him as she hands him a hot mug of coffee.

He takes it carefully, testing the heat with his bottom lip against the rim of the cup. He’s wearing slacks and a dress shirt. He’s got his bag hooked over his arm and his keys are tilting his jacket down on the right side. He says, “What?” into the shallow hollow of the cup, as he takes a careful sip.

She says, “I just love your face.”

He has to stop himself from self-sabotaging, from grimacing or frowning or scowling with the face that she apparently loves. He just continues drinking from his mug as he reaches out to her with his free hand and softly runs a knuckle against the side of her leg. He knows that she’s just really soft on him right now because of the sex. He knows he has made her happy — and it inexplicably makes him feel so self-conscious and embarrassed. He supposes that he is too used to his own narrative of ‘freak of nature who is to be benignly tolerated by the people he loves.’

“Wanna do a nice dinner tonight?” she asks him softly, grabbing onto his hand to hold onto it, lightly swinging it in between their bodies. “I’ll pay. We’ll dress up a little. I’ll take you out all proper. We’ll have a nice chat. We’ll come home a little tipsy. You’ll put out at the end of the night.” She is smiling at him — just so unrelentingly.

His voice is moderated and pretty calm and casual — as he says, “Sure. I can do that.”

 _“Sure, I can do that,”_ she repeats, mocking him as her smiles transitions into a smirk.

He kind of tries to laugh. Because he gets that he is like, extremely tense and weird right now. He knows that she knows and she is indulging him in it right now. He hates this about himself, too. That he induces such understanding from people.

She’s leaning into him. Her face is tilted up. Her eyelashes are low, giving her the appearance of sleepy eyes. She murmurs to him, “God, I wasted so much time when it came to you and us,” as her eyes search his face. “I wasted so much time being worried about all of the wrong things.”

 

 

By lunchtime, Missandei has already texted her buddies on group chat to joyfully announce that someone had an orgasm! Spoiler! It's not her! But someone totally came against her butt last night!

Dany is quietly in the middle of reading work emails on her laptop when the message comes in. She's in the middle of sipping a latte from a paper cup when she flips her phone over to check the message.

And then Dany starts hacking — she starts violently coughing and trying to expel coffee and frothy foam from the wrong pipe. She grips the table to keep herself from sliding around on her desk chair. 

In the time that Dany is choking, Irri has already sent about twelve clapping hands emojis, and Yara has already dryly added to the conversation with: _I thought you were shit at sex?_  

Yara then adds: _Can't wait to talk to him about this later._

By lunchtime, Missy has called her doctor’s office to shake them down for information. It is with bland politeness that they tell her that she is clean as a whistle. No herpes, either.

She growls out a victorious yes, amusing the medical assistant on the other end, and pumps her fist in the air, causing Tyrion to regard her with a raised brow and a smile.

She can’t wait to tell Grey, so she texts him and tells him to brace himself for some nasty, gloveless sex in the near future.

It takes him twenty minutes to respond to her. This is exactly why he and his friends don't have a fun, ongoing group text thing like she does with hers. This is why he always shrugs when she asks him probing questions about the dreams and aspirations and inner depths of feeling that Balaq or Tal or Kojja might have. She likes to ask Grey stuff like whether or not Xhondo enjoys his job. Grey likes to respond with, "No idea." She likes to ask him why he doesn't know. And he gives her a perturbed look, like he doesn't get why she even fucking cares about whether or not Xhondo feels professionally fulfilled. Like, who gives a fuck? 

After twenty minutes have passed, he seriously texts her back with: _wtf???_

It makes her laugh into the phone screen, spitting on it a little bit. She likes how she keeps learning that he’s his own worst cockblock. She likes how she’s learning sexual confidence through this — because she will not be dissuaded or scared off from him by his own manifested fears.

She clarifies in another text. She tells him she has no STIs.

By 12 o’clock, he still hasn’t responded to her. This is partly why he's so emotionally constipated. It's because he's so bad at texting.

She has to read her porn magazines sitting on a public restroom toilet seat, with an apple in her hand. It’s the only place where she can get privacy and not feel completely embarrassed by the curious eyes of coworkers and strangers. Her enduring presence in the ladies room — her heels peeking out underneath the stall doors — makes it hard for any of the other women in her building to poop. Once, someone opens the door with a slam, walks in, probably spies Missy’s feet, and then the person just backs the heck out of the ladies room, presumably to find some privacy in another restroom.

 

 

  
By his lunchtime, he has come to the conclusion that his current problem in life is that his woman witnessed his orgasm and instead of puking her guts out because she is repulsed by how stupid and weird he is during sex, she was apparently fine with it. Enough to solicit a repeat through some disturbingly over-confident sexting. He really doesn’t think she is lying to him about how she feels. He doesn’t think she is putting on an affectation in order to assuage his fragile ego. He realizes that she is being legit.

It is so fucking bizarre.

His problem is that it feels wrong when things just go well. It just doesn’t seem right when things go well. He like, doesn’t have a dick — and she is just _fine_ with it? That is crazy.

He heads to dinner right after work — because he doesn’t get more dressed up than in his suit. Like, he doesn’t have nicer clothes than this.

He gets antsy when she doesn’t show up on time — he starts worrying that maybe he went to the wrong restaurant — and then feels like a real tool when she shows up a few minutes later, smelling like perfume, her hair all fluffed up and artfully framing her beaming face. There is a dress. Heels. There is cleavage. And red lipstick. She is a little late because she actually took off work a little early to go home and change.

The last time he dated someone, he was kind of a child and didn’t have a disposable income — so he doesn’t really think he’s ever been on _this kind_ of date ever before in his life.

Neither has she, but she’s handling it with more aplomb than he is.

She grabs his hand and squeezes it. She softly says, “Hey, baby.”

He says, “Hey.” And then he sighs. Because now he knows he’s going to have to try really hard to give her good sex later tonight.

 

 

 

 

 


	69. Grey and Missy make plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missy have date night. And then there is just a lot of sex.

 

 

 

After they are seated across from each other, she leans over and conspiratorially, like it’s a secret, whispers to him that he looks so freaking good — just really handsome and well put-together. She bashfully and self-consciously tells him that she’s really like, proud to be seen in public with him. As it comes out of her mouth — so purely and truthfully — she knows that he totally hates it. And that makes her smile deepen.

He can’t handle how this woman is fucking staring at him, like she is so in love with him, so he self-sabotages and is like, “I’m literally wearing the same thing I wore this morning.” He gestures at himself. “You saw me leave the house in it so this can’t be a surprise to you.”

She is actually so charmed by how awkward he is with compliments. She thinks he’s so freaking adorable and cute because he’s has such deeply ingrained body consciousness rooted in trauma.

She deepens her voice. She is mimicking his tone as she says, _“And you look nice, too, Missandei.”_

“Okay,” he says flatly, as his heart nervously flutters inside his chest. “Obviously you look hot as shit. Does it really need to be said out loud?”

“Grey,” she says to him, trying to smile less so her face doesn’t look so crazy. “I get you’re trying to ruin this for yourself because you are all freaked out over . . . busting a nut in my ass . . . but I’m not going to let you ruin this for me. I want a nice date night! I want to eat a nice _dinner._ Yesterday, you gave me a potato to eat. And it was lovely, but still. It was a potato.” And then she sits straighter in her seat. “Also — do you really think I look hot as shit?” She is back to grinning like a lunatic because he thinks she looks pretty! She smooths her hands down the front of her dress. “I don’t get gussied up all that often. Do you think it’s okay that my bra straps are showing? I tried to quickly look in my magazines, but the models are not wearing bras at all and I’m like — is that _the look_ these days?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he mutters. “I’m gonna take it all off later anyway.”

She points her finger at him — assessingly. She says, “Okay, that’s more like it! We need more sexy banter like that from you. We need you to look less like you’re about to be waterboarded.”

The server comes up to them right at this precise moment, which amuses her and feels especially mortifying to him. Nobody gives any indication that any private conversation was overhead. Grey orders a glass of wine to calm some of his nerves. Missandei sticks with water. After the server leaves again, she is leaning over, snickering, and telling him that she is not drinking tonight because she doesn’t want to have weird poops two days from now.

When he does not laugh in response — he is so serious and severe right now — she also decides to settle down and starts speaking with more gravity. She supposes that the small-talk portion of the evening is over.

Her heart is also pounding in her throat as she clues him onto the fact that she sort of has a not-so-hidden agenda here. She tells him she wants to have a “relationship talk” and they are in a restaurant right now because she _did_ really want a date night — but also being in public will help them stay on-task as well as prevent her from crying and prevent him from yelling.

“You think we’re going to want to cry and yell at each other?” he asks suspiciously.

“No,” she says, as she looks around the room. “That was sort of a joke. I just want to have a nice dinner, and I didn’t want you to have to cook. I didn’t want the night to be like, four hours of cooking and two minutes of talking before you pass out.”

“We could’ve ordered in,” he says.

She pauses. “What?”

She actually heard him. She just doesn’t understand what compels him to constantly correct her sometimes.

Oh wait. She does know. It’s his dad’s fault.

“We could’ve ordered in food,” he repeats. “So that we get easy dinner and also privacy.”

“But I wanted to dress up.”

“And that’s _fine,”_ he says.

“Okay, you don’t have to say it like that. Like you are permitting that it’s fine.”

 _“What?”_ he balks as his eyes widen. “I don’t get how you read all of that in, _‘That’s fine.’_ All I was saying was . . . literally, it’s fine with me.”

“It’s your tone.” She pauses for just a split second. “It’s a little condescending right now.”

“Uh, what?” He is now frowning.

“Okay, this is a tangent,” she says. “Can we just get back on track?”

“Oh, okay,” he says sarcastically. “I guess I’ll just ignore and get over the part where you accused me of being condescending like that’s not a big deal.”

“Grey!” she finally snaps. “Fine! I take it back! You are not condescending _ever!_ You are just speaking to me in a completely normal tone of voice always, _okay?”_

“Wow,” he says, still pretty darkly sarcastic. _“Okay._ So it’s like that now.”

And because she is already so freaking frustrated with him and how he is just constantly trying to fucking ruin things for them with his shitty personality and stupid self-defense mechanisms, she decides to gather up all of her intimate knowledge of him — and she decides to just throw it back into his stupid, shitty face.

A little too loudly, she says, “Hey! You can _relax,_ okay! You don’t have _actually_ to put out at the end of the night, _okay?_ That was a freaking _joke._ You can freaking do what you want and what makes you feel comfortable always, _okay?”_

“That’s not a joke, Missandei!” he snaps back, still opting to focus on just all of the wrong things. “That’s not how you construct a joke. That’s just a low-key lie!”

“That’s basically your repertoire,” she says bitterly. “I’m just telling Grey jokes right now.”

“What? _No.”_

“Dammit.” She starts fanning herself, particularly her pits, with her hands. “You are making me sweat in my dress.”

 

 

  
Things _kind of_ simmer down a little bit once Grey’s glass of wine arrives. He looks at the thing like its his salvation and grabs it with both hands. She watches him, unamused, and she reminds him that they drove separately, so he should try not to overdo it. He actually _rolls his eyes_ at her and tells her that he’s only having one glass. He’s not planning on going on a fucking bender. He says, “God, you and your family are _obsessed_ with drinking and driving.”

There are various things in what he said that perturbed her — like how he aggressively dropped the f-bomb and how he randomly brought up her family — and how he’s acting like drunk driving isn’t completely illegal and also really selfish and dangerous.

But she gets that he is just nervous and he gets mad defensive and antagonistic when he gets nervous because he’s trying to protect himself. Yadda yadda yadda. It’s boring, and it’s routine by now.

So she says, “So I went on a date with another man this week. With your blessing. And he tried to kiss me at the end of our date, which — you know — kind of makes sense?”

 _“What!_ You _kissed_ him?”

“No!” she says immediately, just stunned at how bad he is at listening right now. “I didn’t! I said he _tried._ And I stopped him and said I was with you!”

“Oh, okay!” he says, still amped up on the self-righteous energy he has generated, but a little lost because he currently has nowhere to direct it.

 

 

  
So they have to reset again. This time, the reset is a lot more successful because she opens up the conversation again by being transparent and vulnerable, by telling him that she’s really scared and nervous about a future with him — but she also really, really needs to be with him. She tells him she has _so many_ questions about what he wants from her and where he wants them to go.

She figures that he’d have to be a massive dick to throw this back in her face.

And he doesn’t. He actually takes a few slow seconds to think about what she just said — thoughtfully.

And then carefully, he tells her that for him, it is so much simpler. For him, he just wants to continue being with her. They can argue and snipe at each other all they want, but at the end of the day, he still wants to be with her. He figures that the plan is still that they are going to live together. And then, at some point, if things keep going well, it would be nice if they try and start a family together.

He tells her that’s the general plan for him — and they’ve talked about this — so he doesn’t really understand why she feels it’s so ambiguous still.

She feels embarrassed and bashful, as she tells him that she was scared he had privately changed his mind. She was scared she hadn’t heard him right. Her mind really messes with her, and that’s why she needs to have conversations repeatedly sometimes. She also wants details and a plan of action. Like, when are they moving in together? Are they going to find a new place or are they going to move into his place or her place?

“My place,” he says, cutting in gently. “Because your lease must be close to being up, right? And mine is like — I still have at least six months left. After, if you want, we can find somewhere else to live.”

In wonderment, she says, “You’ve thought about this. You’ve got it kinda mapped out.”

“Well, _yeah,_ Miss,” he said. “The point is to save money.”

“Super romantic,” she mutters in response. And then right after, she laughs — in relief. She squeals and she says, “Yay! Man! You don’t even know how crazy I was driving myself! I was like — wondering why you were trying to pimp me out to another man, _is it because you don’t love me anymore?”_

He grimaces. And then he says, “You’re fucking nuts sometimes. I don’t lie! Except when I’m being hilarious, I guess. But I generally don’t lie. I’d _tell you_ if I changed my mind about something. And I haven’t. And I literally _tell you_ I love you like, at least once a day. What more do you want?”

She hides her grin behind her hand, because this asshole has a real point. It’s embarrassing, how legit his point is.

And then changing the subject slightly, she tells him, “I tried to convince Zinash to be my friend and for us to hang out platonically sometimes. And he seriously was like, ‘No thanks. I thought you were available.’ And then he said something about being friendzoned ‘again’! Can you believe that! Why wouldn’t he want to be my friend! And I can’t believe my mom! It’s like, she doesn’t know my type at all!”

He is smiling into his glass, half finished by now. He says, “And what is your type, Missandei?”

 

 

They start talking about sex when the entrees arrive. She starts whispering because she’s a little embarrassed about it, naturally. He speaks in his normal speaking voice. He’s also embarrassed about it — but they don’t need to like, speak in code here. No one else gives a shit about their conversation. Other people are engrossed in their own shit. That’s what Missandei often doesn’t realize. She thinks the world is scrutinizing her when really, the world is pretty apathetic to her existence. And that’s empowering knowledge. It’s easy to do whatever the fuck they want, when they know that no one is watching.

“Wait, are you talking about sex right now?” she asks quickly, her eyes bugging out.

“Yeah,” he says in a deadpan. “I’m ramping up to a conversation about anal.”

“What!” she hisses.

“That’s a fucking joke!” he throws back. “Shit!”

“Okay, see!” she urges. “Your joke is a _lie.”_

“Nah,” he drawls. “I mean, yes. But it has a certain quality. It has a certain exaggerated quality. It’s not just a straight up lie. It’s more nuanced than that.”

She’s shaking her head. She’s got her arms crossed over her chest now. She says, “I might not be completely opposed to butt stuff.”

He freezes. He stares back at her. He says, “Is this a ‘Missandei joke?’”

She shakes her head, to convey her seriousness. “Like, last night was really fun,” she offers.

He’s shaking his head, too. “Dude, last night was _really fun.”_

“I know! It _was_ really good.”

“Yeah, I had a really nice time.”

“I _know_ you did.”

He grimaces again. He also groans. He says, “Yeah. I feel weird about that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t actually know? I just feel like, embarrassed about it. I was like, so . . . needy. And I was saying these things and making these sounds. At the very least, you didn’t have to look at my stupid face when I . . . finished.”

 

 

  
When they get back to her apartment, she’s giggling as he grabs her ass and pulls her tightly to his body. She dodges his kiss and tells him that he honestly does not have to put out tonight. No pressure.

He answers her by unbuttoning and unzipping his pants. And then he pulls her onto the couch. And then she’s sort of looming over him, straddling with her knees digging into the couch cushions, with her hand in his underwear, stroking and rubbing, as he pulls down the stretchy bust of her dress, as he frees her breasts, as he squeezes and then licks and then lightly bites.

She deliriously helps him undress her the rest of the way, keeping her hand on his body. She’s addicted to the way he groans and growls and sighs softly into her skin.

Later in bed, he cuts up a condom, she presses the sheet down as a barrier between them as she climbs on top of him. She whimpers as she sits down and situates herself over him. She can feel the way his anatomy has actually changed, the more aroused he gets.

He also gets a little self-conscious and he tells her that this is not ideal, and it creates a bit of a mess as time goes on. He tells her she should also be prepared to hop off at some point, so accidents don’t accidentally happen. He gets all nervous about this — and his face and his expression just murders her heart.

She plants her palms down on his chest and she tells him that he better fucking go to the doctor tomorrow. He better fucking get the okay to fuck her real dirty, without latex, soon.

And then it’s a little incoherent for a while, as they both discover that they like this new thing — a lot. It starts off slow and careful. And then her eyes roll back and she tells him it’s _so good._ And then, emboldened by that, he presses her down hard, so that she knows she doesn’t have to be that careful. And then she gasps out this cry because it is _so good._ And then it goes harder — faster and rougher.

He flips her over before he finishes, so that he can drive it. She keeps encouraging him by loudly saying his name. He is still coming earlier than he wants. He still hasn’t had enough sex with her to be able to benchmark this — to know whether it’s just normal and he’s being too critical and hard on himself — or whether it’s abnormal and he’s seriously coming too quickly.

He tells her as much after he finishes, after he catches his breath — and she laughs as she smears the sweat on her naked chest. He has to get up to clean himself up — and she follows him into the bathroom to watch because she’s deeply curious.

Then, they spend twenty minutes after that snuggled up underneath really hot, kind of damp blankets. The conversation meanders. They dissect the sex that they just had with each other. They both agree that it was _the shit._ They both agree that it was some grade A sex. She tells him that she thinks the next time they do that, she can probably almost orgasm. Probably. He suggests she get an assist from her vibrator. She is scandalized and, in shock, asks him how he knows that Yara gave her a vibrator. He blandly tells her he saw it in her purse. She asks him if he was snooping. He tells her, “No, psycho. You just leave that shit lying around for me to clean up all the time!”

She also asks him if it’s normal for things to get . . . so wet. He actually pauses, before he says that it’s a little different than what he’s known. He delicately tells her that she’s the one who is like . . . making most of this mess. He tells her that maybe they can buy a waterproof cover for the mattress or something.

Which makes her laugh. Her laugh becomes a snort as she buries it in his shoulder.

She gets really girly and really mushy at a point. She rubs her nose into his skin, smelling him and smelling the lingering aura of sex. She repeatedly talks to him about how much she loves him. She keeps asking him if he even knows how much she loves him. She tells him it’s vast, and it’s almost unfathomable.

He gets weird about it. He gruffly tells her that he knows, don’t worry about it. And he actually cautiously tells her it’s reciprocated. Like, he honestly can’t imagine living without her anymore. And then he flushes. And then he clears his throat. And then he points out that what he just said sounded kind of hysterically suicidal. He jokingly assures her that he won’t kill himself if she decides to leave him one day.

She gets emotional about that — about the idea of it — of them breaking apart and also of him dying. She actually start tearing up. She asks him why he would even think that they’d break up one day.

He says, “Anything can happen. Feelings can change over time.”

She says, “No,” as she urgently shakes her head. She repeats the no as she grabs his face, turns it, and then kisses his mouth.

The kiss starts off exploratory and wet, with her tongue dipping into his mouth for short little tastes.

And then he groans and rolls over, pinning her body down underneath his. The kissing becomes hard and thorough — inelegant — with their tongues jammed into each other’s mouths.

It’s when she’s clawing her nails into his ass — and when his hand has wedged its way in between their bodies, in between her legs, parting her and then slowly entering her — that’s when she says, “Okay, come on,” as she reaches down, touches her own clit, and says, “There,” like she is teaching him. She still cannot be super explicit verbally, but she is making this steady progress that he finds very sexy and very appealing.

He breathes out, “Oh shit. _Okay,”_ as he starts gently touching her where she directed him to.

He tries to get her mind off of the pressure of orgasming by telling her jokes, making fun of the quirky things she does in life, and also by telling her that her fucking body drives him nuts because it’s so fucking hot and tight. He has to correct himself. He tells her he means tight like her body is fit and healthy-looking to him, not tight like _her vagina_ is tight. That’s disgusting. Not her vagina — but the notion of a tight vaginal canal. Not that hers isn’t like, pleasantly firm — but that’s not really something that he’s all about.

With her eyes shut tight and her face screwed up in concentration, she says, “Oh my God, motherfucker, _shut up._ Talk about something else!”

He starts kissing her breasts as he continues rolling circles around her clit with his thumb, as two fingers inside of her run up and down the squishy underside of her interior wall. He tells her, “I fucking love your boobs.” He also tells her that Yara likes to use the word tits. And he doesn’t love that word. So he says boobs. But boobs also sound really juvenile. And breasts sound stodgy and white and clinical.

She screeches out, “Grey! Babe! What are you _doing!_ Can you _shut up!_ What do I have to say or do to get your mouth to _shut the fuck up?”_

This is how she ends up on her back again. This is how she ends up with her legs hooked over his shoulders and his warm breath hovering intimately over her raw and sensitive skin.

She releases an uncertain gasp, as his wet mouth closes down on her. She instinctively reaches down to grab at his hair, but the close crop leaves her with nothing easy to hold onto.

He licks a line right down the center of her. She can hear the sound of it. She swallows the lump in her throat as her body twitches — her clit is sensitive.

She nervously asks, “How do I taste?”

He quietly chuckles against her body. He pauses. He says, “I’m into it. This is doing it for me.”

She valiantly lets him eat her out for what feels like really long minutes. He honestly seems like he’s doing a really good job. He’s got his fingers stroking in and out of her. He got his tongue around, but not directly on her clit. He has been really steady and not erratic at all. He seems like he’s doing a really good job.

She finds herself going back to her consistent, terrible thought patterns. She hates that this is taking so long. She hates that she has nothing to do. She hates how discouraged she feels about an orgasm.

She sighs. She says, “Grey. I don’t think it’s happening.”

He pauses. He makes eye contact with her, with his mouth still on her body. She knows it’s telling, that the sight embarrasses her rather than turns her on. He finally disconnects. He gently says, “It’s okay. What do you want to do instead?”

She reaches both of her arms out to him. She tears up again as the bed creaks, as he crawls up and immediately pulls her into a tight, full-bodied hug. He kisses her nicely and gently — and she tastes her distinctive taste on his mouth. She squeezes his entire head as hard as she can. She reminds him that she really fucking loves him so much.

He asks, “Do you wanna talk about it?”

And she really does not. She dreads it.

But she also realizes that it’s an internal battle for him, every time he takes his pants off in front of her in service of sex. So she opens up her mouth. She tells him that she thinks that he is going down on her because he feels like he has to. And she feels self-conscious that he feels like he has to.

He says, “Um, I don’t feel like I have to. I want to. I like it. But you get freaked out about it — so that’s why I’m a little cautious about bringing it up.”

She has nothing smart to say in response to that — she just feels massively stupid and awkward. So she tells him that she feels really unsexy during oral. She tells him her body is just flopped down like she’s a dead fish. She tells him she doesn’t know what to do, so she just lies there. She is a starfish.

He is like, “Um, what does that mean? What’s a starfish?”

So then, she has to feel humiliated as she explains to him, what a starfish is.

After she does, he has to like, cough. To cover up his laugh. She has to hit him, to tell him it’s not funny. He tells her that he knows — he knows it’s not funny.

He tells her that she’s not a fucking starfish. He tells her that he loves the way she responds to sex. He loves the way she vocalizes during sex. He never actually thought that she’d ever actually enjoy having sex with him — back when they were just friends and he had these gross fantasies about the two of them like, fucking. Even in his fantasies, she was kind of only giving him pity sex because he’s so pathetic. He tells her that the current reality — of her being like, into it — is more than he has ever really imagined. So that’s nice. It’s been a nice surprise for him. He used to be afraid that she was — never going to feel this way about him. Like, he used to be afraid that she would forever be into his intelligence and his personality and the fact that he makes her laugh — but she’d have to like, put up with his body and with sex in order to get the things she actually likes about him. He is musing out loud, as he says, “I was kind of . . . not really expecting you to want me . . . like this — ever.”

She is crying again, something that he notices with alarm. He tries to touch her face. She ends up swatting his hand away. She tells him, “I was such an asshole.”

He says, “You really weren’t. It’s understandable that you were apprehensive.”

She says, “I should’ve been trying to fuck you from the moment I met you.”

He pulls his face into an uncertain smile. He says, “That would’ve been very scary for me.”

She says, “Baby, I love having sex with you.”

He simply says, “I know.”

She takes in a big, fortifying breath. She announces, “Okay, I’m ready to try again.”

He is like, “Huh?”

She says, “I’m ready for you to go down on me again. Like, I’m ready to get fucked by your mouth for real this time.”

He rolls over to face her more fully. He’s smiling. He says, “Look at you,” as he runs a finger down in between her breasts.

She’s getting herself into position and has got her legs spread out wide on the bed. She’s waiting for him to crawl back down there. She’s already mapping out what she’s going to say and what she’s going to do — to make this time different. She’s gonna tell him ‘yes’ a lot more. She’s gonna tell him to be a little less gentle on her clit this time around. She’s going say some filthy ass things to him to get him to look at her — so they can make eye contact and make it a little bit more romantic.

She’s about to tell him she’s ready, when he grabs her hip and forces her to flip over. She gets to her hands and knees in confusion. She never, in a million years, thought she would be playing such naked games so casually with another person like this. She looks at him. He is smirking. His eyes are also intense. She is like, oh shit, in her head. She also starts flushing because she now knows this is his sex face. His stupid-hot sex face.

She turns her face away for a moment. She’s nervous again. She actually says, “Ahh, _shit,”_ out loud when he pulls her over, on top of him, when he grabs her bare ass with both hands and squeezes it, pushing her cheeks together before he pulls them apart and she is mentally screaming,  _what is happening right nowww?_ Is _butt stuff_ about to happen _right now?_

Her heart is pounding as he huskily says, “Do you wanna scoot up?”

Her eyes are wide. She nervously says, “You mean —”

“Yeah,” he says.

“On your fucking _face?”_

He chuckles. He says, “Yeah.”

She transitions her expression into a terrified smile. Her mind is currently a big fat no on this one. She is frantically thinking that this is some advanced shit. This is shit that like, should happen after she masters like, getting eaten out while lying on her back. Like, people can’t just skip ahead like this. Like, this is some 401-level shit and she barely got her prerequisites down.

In a funny, strangled voice, she croaks out, “What if it’s so bad? What if it’s awkward? What if I suffocate you to death with my _fat vagina_ and then when the police come, I have to tell them how you died? What if _my brothers_ get called and get told that their little sister _murdered you_ with her _vagina?_ Baby. I can’t live with that.”

“Babe,” he says calmly, warmly squeezing her breast and nipple in his hand — in reassurance. “We actually don’t have to do this. It’s your choice. It’s just an idea. I thought you might like it because you can like, control things. But you don’t have to do this right now if you don’t want to. We can totally do other stuff. Also, your vagina isn’t fat? And I’m stronger than you are, so I can just shove you off if you are suffocating me.”

So . . . he is so sweet that she eventually makes the mind-breaking decision to straddle his head and sit on his face. Sort of. She’s not really sitting. Her thighs start shaking right away, from nerves and also fear. She’s afraid she’s going to like, make him uncomfortable by sitting on him too hard.

She actually says, “Oh my God, what the fuck?” as she grabs onto the headboard, as she looks down at his eyes, as she feels his mouth and his tongue make contact with a really, really intimate part of her body. Her face _burns up,_ and she mutters, “Oh fuck,” as he reaches up to manipulate her boobs, as he shoves his tongue into her.

She lets out this cry of disbelief, as she lowers herself just a little bit more.

He is smiling — laughing at her. She can fucking tell.

She says, “Okay, this _is_ better,” as she looks down at him. She says, “Fuck! _Why!”_

He’s kind of laughing for real. She can feel his chuckles against her vagina. So that’s like, something new that they have now.

And then she refocuses.

She discovers she can like, push and position and smear and grind herself against his mouth and tongue. When she discovers this — her body floods in heat — in this muddy relief. She starts to quietly tell him to be a little rougher with her — in general. She tells him she likes it when he wants her and needs her.

She groans when he complies. She leans forward and groans into her arms, which are braced against the top of the headboard. She gasps at the new angle. She shuts her eyes. She mutters, “What the fuck, this is better.” She keeps repeating that it’s better, even though what she actually means is that this is really fucking _nice._

She presses her forehead into the wall. She focuses on the steady suction of his mouth and lips and tongue on her clit and his fingers inside of her. She whimpers loudly. She finally says, “Oh my God, that’s so _good,”_ which finally signals to him that this is going to be _it._ They have figured it out.

She loses self-consciousness over time, as she gets more and more wrapped up in how good it feels and how tingly it is and how if she just clenches really hard, she can almost skirt around the edge of an orgasm.

She rambling to him. She mutters and tells him that he’s so fucking good at this, and she’s going to tell everyone fucking about it. She tells him she can’t wait to do this to him. She can’t wait to get him off with just her mouth. She tells him he’s so fucking hot — he’s so hot when he comes. His face gets all puffy and there’s a vein that pops out on his forehead and it’s like, just fuck her forever, please. She tells him that she’s going to let him come on her face later.

This startles him. He suddenly stops so he can stare up at her.

She snaps. “Grey! Don’t stop!” as she grinds down messily and harshly on him.

He obediently resumes.

And then she sighs breathily. She says, “Oh, yes,” as she bites down on her bottom lip, as she tilts her face to the ceiling now, shutting her eyes.

She internally debates for a while — over whether or not she should ask him to put a finger in her butt — because maybe she’s this kind of sex partner now?

But she finds that her internal debate is still nervous sometimes. It’s still pulling her mind away from her orgasm. That’s also some 401-level shit. She can’t possibly fly too close to the sun today.

So she puts a pin in that for the time being.

Instead, she says, “Harder,” because she’s getting close, and she can stand to have more pressure the closer she gets. She repeats, _“Harder,”_ when he responds demurely, when he only increases the pressure of his mouth just a little bit.

She full-on tries to sit on him, to get the kind of pressure she is looking for — and that’s when she realizes that he is holding her up. He is holding up some of her body weight with his arms. This realization hilariously stuns her. She stares down at him in bewilderment. She says, “You’re so strong!”

And then she reminds him that he’s so fucking hot again. And then she says, “Come on, dude, you need to fuck me _harder.”_

That makes him go _really_ hard, with his teeth and the entire flat muscle of his tongue rasping against her, as he sucks down _really, really_ hard.

It almost hurts. And it also jumpstarts an orgasm. She recognizes it — so she bears down hard and clenches up tight, around his fingers in her body. She tries to warn him it’s happening. She says, “Oh my God, it’s happening,” as she grits her teeth and clenches up everything up even tighter.

And then she says, “Oh God,” as it hits her and as her body relaxes and jolts into a series of really pleasurable spasms.

 

 

  
He rubs his face — his sore-ass face and mouth. And he mutters, “Oh my God, we have to work tomorrow still,” as she coos against him and as her hand drifts down his body and touches him intimately. She is currently really obsessed with him — just really into him because he just did really great sex stuff to her body and fucked an orgasm out of her — which was kind of almost an insurmountable task — and that sort of thing has _gone to her head_. His jaw is tired. His lips are puffy and raw. His body is boneless and greasy with sweat. He didn’t believe they’d arrive at this point ever — where he’d be like, kind of too exhausted for more sex. He gently tells her, “Babe, like, it’s two in the morning.”

“Call in sick,” she suggests, pulling the blanket and sheet over her head, as she generally scoots her way down his body.

“Um, no. That’s irresponsible.”

“I like how we went from no sex to like . . . _a lot of sex,”_ she says, now just a rustling hill underneath a mound of her bedding. She adds, “Sex is so _fun._ How did I not know that sex is _this fun?_ I can’t believe it’s so much fun! And to think! We were actually entertaining the idea of being in a sexless relationship!”

“Um, actually, we were entertaining the idea of being in a one-sided relationship where you begrudgingly give it up every now and then to make me happy.”

She groans. She says, “Baby, you make me so sad for you sometimes.”

He’s shrugging, even though she can’t see.

And then he says, “Ah, _fuck,”_ as her wet tongue licks around the base of his penis. His body actually fucking snaps right to arousal again. His body is down for this even though it should fucking know better.

He tells her, “We should go to sleep. It’s so late.”

He feels her breasts skimming his thighs. He feels her hot breath. He hears her dark voice say, “You’re salty. And a little metallic.”

He says, “Ah, _fuck,”_ as his hands bury themselves in the blankets. He says it because they are probably not going to get any sleep at all.

And then he throws the blankets off her, exposing her entire naked body. He does it because he knows she’s going to lose air underneath there. Also, he wants to watch.

As if reading his mind, she licks him — with like, a lot of sexy eye contact. The heart shape of her ass is up in the air. It’s really crazy to both of them, how sexually active they are right now.

She says, “Well, _I’m_ going to call in sick to my boss. But I'll tell Tyrion the truth of course. He'll be happy for me. And then I’m going to sleep in and play hooky tomorrow.”

 

 

 


	70. Missy and Grey live their best lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The longest epilogue ever: Grey and Missy like, level up incrementally in their continuing togetherness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OMG is it done. Thank you to the commenters (postfebrile, Ti, Anjelicatheterrible, RRandomm, kalipersephone, staytravelin, and more!), whose investment in this story just fed my soul and made me low-key not do my job on some days. LOLOL <3

 

 

 

He feels like shit the next day, surviving on just a few scant hours of sleep as his alarm rips him into consciousness, as she groans besides him and then mindlessly shoves him and tells him to turn off the alarm like an asshole.

As he gets ready for work, her thick voice calls out to him. She is careless and drowsily telling him to just come back to bed already. He reminds to himself that this bitch really _did_ email in sick because she stayed up too late having sex. He wonders to himself how is she even _living with herself?_ How is she even coping with the _shame?_

She moans as she rolls over into the spot that he just vacated. She spreads her arms and legs out wide, taking advantage of having the bed to herself.

He walks back to the bed in his work clothes, to lift up the sheets and blankets. He pulls them over her naked body, covering the curves of her butt and spine.

He rolls her over and kisses her before he goes, with her hand gripping his tie and trying to pull him back down into the bed. She shoves the sheets down to her hips and exposes herself to him to give him a reason to stay. He has to cover her back up and tell her to calm the fuck down because it’s six-thirty in the morning. He has to fight her to get his tie back. He has to crankily remind her that she is disrupting his entire fucking life enough with her body.

His eyes are dry and his hands are shaky as he scrolls through his calendar to see the meetings he has scheduled for the day.

During his midday break, in between blocks of meetings, Grey dryly tells Dr. Tarly that he needs STI tests because he’s in a relationship now, and the person he is in a relationship with is insisting on this. Grey doesn’t know why he sounds so belligerent and why he sounds so resentful of safe sex. It’s actually quite bizarre. He’s actually a big fan of safe sex because his mom and dad poisoned his mind with like, ethics and morals.

Dr. Tarly agrees that safe sex is the way to go. Dr. Tarly says, “Ah, that’s a very responsible partner you have there.”

Grey sighs and mutters, “Yeah, she’s okay sometimes.”

And then he confesses that they’ve been a little sloppy with sex in the last day or so. He refrains from going into detail — from telling his doctor that Missandei went down on him without a barrier for a few minutes before he freaked out and realize what that bitch was doing and then stopped her long enough to put a barrier between her mouth and his junk.

Grey feels guilt-addled over this, because he should be better than this. He tells Dr. Tarly it would be awesome if she gets an STI from one minor slip-up. That would like, really teach them a great life lesson.

He is so tired and so cranky right now.

He didn’t have time to shower. He only had time to obsessively wipe himself down with soapy water a few times in the men’s restroom at work in preparation. It feels like sex is written all over his body, when Dr. Tarly pulls apart Grey’s dressing gown and looks at his genitals.

 

 

  
He and Missandei start having _a lot of sex_ , to the point where she cancels plans with her friends one night just to fuck — and to the point where he actually full-on falls asleep in a meeting and is jolted awake when Barristan gently says his name.

After that really shameful incident, Grey puts down some boundaries. He tells her that they can only have sex four days a week and never past one in the morning. Like, they have to stop what they are doing once the clock strikes one.

It’s all a bit arbitrary and unnecessarily rigid because he is just stressed out, which she realizes right away.

He actually thinks this is very reasonable. He tells her rules are great. Over dinner, he tells her that rules will save them, with his hand clenched tightly around his butter knife — _for what_ , he’s not even sure.

She dryly asks him, “Like, are you planning on like, shanking me if I try to fuck you on a Tuesday or something?”

They are really bad at sticking to Grey’s really bogus schedule. They keep having sex as they are watching TV on the couch, as they are getting a meal ready together, and as they get dressed to go over to have dinner with friends. They end up showing up twenty minutes late. He fucking hates himself for this. He hates the way his friends are looking at them. He hates how fucking disheveled and dazed Missandei looks almost all the time now — like she can’t even stop herself from telegraphing their private shit out into the world with her body and her face.

He stops himself from punching Drogo in the face when Drogo tries to laughingly high-five him.

Dany tells Missandei to just lean into it — enjoy it. Both being in long-term relationships, Dany and Yara both remind her that at some point, the mere sight of his face will incite rage and irritation because he left the toilet seat up and she fell into the bowl — or he will ask her for the millionth fucking time, to hang out with his annoy-ass sisters and she will want to hurt his feelings by insulting his entire family.

Obara rolls her eyes at Yara.

Yara and Dany both tell Missy that one day, she will no longer want to fuck him every hour of every day.

Missy tepidly says, “Good. This has been getting in the way of me living my best life.” And then she yawns.

 

 

  
It takes almost another entire week before Grey gets his test results back — maybe because he is lackadaisical and just waited for the results to be snail-mailed to him.

In that week, their first sex-related fight actually happens because she finds the letter from his doctor in the stack of his mail — unopened. She breaks the law by opening his mail and reading about his clean bill of health.

The ensuing fight they have is about her invading his privacy and just opening his shit without permission. The fight is also about how he really gave too few shits about this STI check, like he doesn’t even give a shit about her and _them_ and _their relationship._

And then the fight becomes about him shouting at her in exasperation, about how she is sometimes fucking batshit insane and such a fucking girl sometimes.

This triggers her, so she starts telling him off and telling him he is so sexist sometimes. He starts derisively joking about it. He keeps mockingly asking her how he can be sexist because he is such a feminist. Like, he has a mother so he gets the plight of women. She doesn’t think he’s very funny, so she calls him insensitive. He turns right back around and tells her that she is too fucking sensitive and that he was actually really fucking nervous and worried about the STI test results, but he’s been slammed with work so he didn’t do his fucking life fucking perfectly, so he’s so _sorry_ for being flawed and for being fucking _human._

The angry make-up sex that ensues is really dirty, really delirious, and really raw. It’s the first time they have sex without worrying about transmitting infections. The sexy, wet skin to skin grind rips a scream out of her as she comes, with his teeth biting a bruise into her breast. He also comes _into her._

And then he is screaming, “Shit! We need to go to the fucking pharmacy! Dammit!” because he is so pissed at himself again.

They have really a tense conversation about birth control as they buy the morning after pill together. She is really anxious about it, too, so she reads slut-shaming in every innocuous and not-so-innocuous thing that he says.

Like, he says, “This is all your fault.”

Into the passenger window, she mutters, “I _get_ you think you’re hilarious, but _fuck you.”_

 

 

  
Grey knew that giving Xhondo a puppy was the stupidest idea ever. He shoves his rightness into Alayaya’s face as she is trying to complain to him about how fucking irresponsible that asshole Xhondo is. Alayaya tells him to shut up for a second. She then asks him what the hell she’s supposed to do with a returned five-month-old puppy? Her building doesn’t allow more than one pet the size of Muffin. What is she going to _do?_

Grey tells her, “I’m not taking this dog.”

Alayaya frowns and says, “It’s Muffin’s daughter, though. You really want me to take her to the pound?”

This is how Grey ends up with one really badly trained, really ill-behaved dog in his care. This is why Grey forces Missandei to come along while he spills the news to his folks, because his dad loves her so much for really bullshit non-reasons.

He’s got a leash in hand and he’s struggling with this animal, who has a _massive_ attention deficit disorder, who is constantly trying to choke herself to death by lunging at like, air. She keeps trying to kill him by wrapping her leash around his legs.

He is yelling, “Calm the fuck down! Goddammit!” at the dog, as Missandei tries to calm him down by asking him to please calm down, when his dad opens the front door. They haven’t rung the doorbell yet. His dad just heard Grey’s yelling.

When his dad sees the dog, his dad is like, “Oh, fuck _no._ Nuh uh. I don’t fucking _think so,_ Nudho.”

And then his dad promptly falls in love.

And then when his mom gets home from dinner with her friends, she is like, _“Grey._ No.”

And Grey’s dad’s tone is gentle and cajoling, as he is like, “Sanaa, it might be fun. You’ve always wanted a daughter.”

 

 

  
When Missy’s mom calmly and super casually mentions to her that she talked to Zinash’s mother — and Zinash had some choice words about Missandei’s conduct — well, Missy just sets her tea cup down after dinner and says, “You guys remember that Grey exists, right? You realize that he and I are _together,_ right?”

Missy’s mom draws her lips into a tight line. Her dad says absolutely nothing. It is unclear just how disapproving he actually is, or if he is going along with Missy’s mom because he has years of guilt that he has to make up for and slog through.

To really drive the knife in deeper, Missy, on purpose, says, “Mommy, Daddy, I love him. We’re moving in together. We’re probably going to be together forever. We’re probably going to try and make babies together at some point. I would love for you to be a part of our lives. But if you can’t — well, I understand.”

The table is dead silent after that. Her mother gives no indication that she heard. Her dad just looks sad. And Missy tells herself that this is probably the best that she can expect.

After dinner, after sneaking out early to chill at her brother’s house, Mars chuckles as he clicks his beer against her glass of wine. He says, “Congrats.”

Moss feels like he has to say it. It’s just a thing at this point. He licks the beer froth off this mustache he’s been trying to grow out to piss off his wife. He says, “Hey, so, gotta know. How are you guys gonna be making babies? Can you get pregnant from oral?”

She rolls her eyes. She says, “Do you really wanna know? Because I will tell you. But you can’t unhear it after I tell you.”

 

 

  
They learn a bunch of terrible things about each other after moving in together. Like, Grey learns that Missandei is a secret slob. Missandei learns that Grey is an anal retentive clean freak who becomes a flaming asshole if there is one dirty dish left in the sink for even ten minutes.

They also learn a bunch of really amazing things about one another. Like, she learns that he’s really receptive to early morning dance parties — which is a dorky thing that she’d never thought he’d loosen up enough to do with her. She learns that he has moves.

She learns that his love language is definitely acts of service. He keeps cleaning up after her. He keeps making her gluten-free food. He keeps arranging her work computer and her mail in ways that are easy for her to use or reference. She also learns that physical touch is another one of his love languages — it was just hidden for a long time because of his body-related anxieties.

She wakes up to him touching her all the time. She also wakes up with him pushing her clothes out of the way so he can kiss her body intimately. She often wakes up with a soft groan, with her teeth clenched and her fingers pinching into his muscles.

She does a stint on low-dose birth control — and even then, it completely throws her out of whack and she ends up sobbing inexplicably on some days. It takes a couple of months before they both realize something is going on.

They then troubleshoot birth control methods. He hates the condom as long-term protection. A one-night stand, sure. But he doesn’t want to deal with it indefinitely. He tells her that they are beyond each other’s one-night stand by this point.

She feels really guilty that her body is so sensitive to hormones. She keeps blaming herself and her stupid weak body for this obstacle.

In response to this, he gives her this tortured look and tells her he was just fucking around about the condom. The condom is great. It is fine! He loves it!

They eventually settle on a diaphragm. With spermicide. It is also inconvenient, because they have to work on the logistics of sex before having sex sometimes. He admits to her that the taste of spermicide is disgusting — and it also lingers.

This makes her fall back on their shared bed in their shared home with all of their shared stuff — and fatalistically say that the world is out to get them.

 

 

  
He actually injures himself for real through a fall. He dislocates his shoulder and has to be taken to the emergency room. There are a few hours that he has to face the possibility of surgery, as they wait for x-rays. In those few hours — with their friends all glumly sitting in a foreign hospital in their snow gear — Missandei learns that his next of kin decision-makers are still his parents. She makes a mental note to talk to him about this when she is not as worried and angry with him.

When he finally gets released, with a sling and some pain meds, she picks a fight with him in the car — in front of all of their weary friends. She yells at him and she tells him that she _told him_ — actually _begged him_ to be fucking careful out there on the fucking mountain. But he just _never listens_ when it comes to these things. He is foolhardy and just selfish because he forgets that there is now someone who fucking cares about him, who freaks out when he doesn’t come home until after dark.

Here, Drogo says, “Uh, sorry. This is kind of my fault. We just got kind of excited —”

“No,” she cuts in. “It’s not your fault. It’s _his_ fault. He’s an adult. He can make his own decisions. And he chose to stay out.”

Grey is exhausted and also a little doped up on pain meds. He doesn’t think he deserves all of the yelling when he’s already been through a fucking ordeal, just worried about his fucking shoulder and whether or not he really fucked it up for life. So he says, “Chill. You’re acting like my nagging wife right now.”

Which sucks up all the air in the car.

Tyrion uneasily laughs. He says, “Good one, Grey! Ha! Jokes!”

When they get back to the cabin, he takes his phone into the living room to call his dad. He wants to check in with his dad about the pain meds he got.

It’s while he’s on the phone with his dad that he understands the kind of position he put her in, the kind of fear he instilled in her. His dad is the one who tells him that he’s being a real fucking asshole, and he needs to apologize to her. Because it was truly an asshole move, to scare the shit out of her and then get mad at her when all she asked was for him to stop having fun like, _half an hour_ before sunset. His dad tells him, “She’s not being unreasonable, son. _You are._ By the way, you also scared the shit out of me and your mom, so we deserve an apology, too. Like I fucking want to get a call during Jeopardy from Missandei telling me you crashed on a fucking mountain in the dark.”

She’s lying down and has her back to him when he enters into their room. She doesn’t turn around when he touches her back with his good hand. She is trying to sort of punish him for being a jerk to her.

And she’s bad at holding grudges. He starts struggling with his sling and his shirt and his clothes — he realizes he is now like Jaime — sort of — okay that’s insensitive. But he is temporarily one-handed, and it sucks.

When she hears him struggling, she’s immediately sitting up. She immediately has her hands on his body, trying to gently help him get ready for bed.

She quietly asks, “Are you in pain?”

He admits, “A little.”

She releases a shuddering breath.

He says, “Baby. I’m so sorry.”

 

 

  
After nearly seven months of living together and having really easy access to sex, after maybe a couple months of being sloppy with birth control because they keep drunkenly and soberly telling one another that it is _probably_ okay because she just had a period and that they are planning on procreating at some point anyway so it’s _probably_ okay — Missandei ends up with her underwear around her ankles as Grey tears into a box with a pregnancy test inside. He is tense, and he keeps cracking the tension with his dark jokes.

Like, he keeps telling her that this unwanted pregnancy is all her fault because she’s such a fucking woman.

He also keeps seriously telling her he doesn’t understand how this happened. He tells her he thought they’d need like, medical intervention, to have a baby. Or a turkey baster at least. He tells her he didn’t think it could actually happen like, naturally? Like, his shit doesn’t shoot up into her that much when they do it, right?

She is so fucking tired of his _nervous talking._ It is giving her a headache.

By the third iteration of the really shitty thing that he is saying to her about how this is all her fault, she snaps at him and tells him to just shut up, otherwise she’s going to be a single mom.

It’s probably the first time that she has ever made a joke about leaving him.

It freaks the both of them out — this subtle switch that is happening already. Already, there’s a possibility that there will be someone she will choose over him — there might be someone eventually that she loves, more than him.

It also freaks both of them out — that apparently she has already made a decision inside of herself — to have the baby if she is pregnant.

He cautiously whispers, “This is happening a lot earlier than I expected it to.”

She jokingly says, “Do you want to leave? Do you want to run for the hills? Do you wanna go buy a pack of cigarettes and then never come back?” as her heart pounds.

The tension breaks soon after she pees on the stick. It’s one of those right-away tests. They learn, right away, that she is pregnant.

She calmly responds with, “I’m going to have to get off of my antidepressants.”

 

 

  
She still has morning sickness as they move into a house. He paints the nursery himself because he doesn’t think she should be sniffing low-VOC paint fumes and making their baby stupid and slow. Grey has become overbearingly protective, and it was cute the first couple of months — now, she just feels like a prisoner in her own new home.

His dad comes over to help him. His dad also spend hours backseat-driving her doctor. His dad mansplains or doctorsplains a bunch of shit to her. And she wants to explode into rage-fueled tears over it.

His dad also intuits this and then slowly explains to her that hormones are flooding her body and making her feel the way she does. He tells her that being off her medication must be a real doozy for her. He assures her it’s temporary.

She actually _does_ snap at him over that. She shouts that it’s really rich that _a man_ is telling her about her own fucking body.

Grey is really scared he will not love the baby. He’s obsessed with this idea. He talks a lot about it, every time he reads new research about it. He tells her that he’s scared that he will resent the baby because it will take her away from him. He reminds her that he hates neediness and he hates hysterical crying. He tells her that this is what babies are _all about._ He tells her he’s scared he will get so angry that he will shake the baby hard and then kill it. And then she will hate him forever because he killed her baby.

She kind of took him seriously the first month he was going on and on about this, in the sense that she was kind of concerned about his mental health — not that she was ever concerned about his ability to murder. But then she talked to his mom, who told Missandei that Grey’s dad was actually the exact same way when she was pregnant with Azzie. Grey’s dad also was talking about killing the baby a lot. But then Azzie came out and all of the murder talk turned out being completely unfounded and irrational. Grey’s dad is obviously obsessed with his kids and would die for them, rather than kill them. So, don’t worry.

After that, Missy is way less concerned about his mental state and not at all about infanticide — nowhere near as much as Grey is. She is pretty confident he will go apeshit over the baby when she comes. He will undoubtedly love the baby. Missy is sure that Grey is just being an unbearable hag because he currently feels useless, as she grows life inside her body. When he feels useless, he is an utter hag.

“Oh my God, _stop!”_ he snaps at her, rushing over to reach over her head to grab the salad bowl that she is trying to pull down. “Just ask for help, holy shit.” He’s afraid that the bowl is going to come crashing down on her skull, cracking it and killing her and the baby.

He has been really _reasonable_ lately.

 

 

  
By the time Azzie and Tarra’s commitment ceremony rolls around, she is fat like a whale. She has to sit around as people do things for her. She has to sit like a fat whale as Grey starts to feed her gluten-free mash with a spoon and she swats the spoon right out of his hand because he’s annoying her so fucking much by treating her like she’s a fucking invalid. She has to deal with people’s glances as she sips from a glass of red wine. She doesn’t know if it’s actually judgement she is actually seeing — it just _feels_ like judgement.

Grey’s dad was actually the one who convinced her to booze it up a little. He assured her that it won’t harm the baby whatsoever. He kindly told her it will help her be less of a bitch to his son all the time. It will help her deal with his annoying son if she is a little looser.

Tarra’s son is super tatted, and he’s the one that asks her if she ever thinks about doing one of these parties — one of these shindigs that his mom and Azzie are doing — with Grey.

She tells him, “I’m having his kid,” as she gestures to her gargantuan stomach. “I’m fine. I don’t need to have a ceremony to know that _that fucker_ is stuck with me _for life.”_

Her parents show up late. She is actually _shocked_ to see them standing on the back deck, talking to Grey, because they never show up to these sorts of things. She is actually shocked to see Grey scanning the back yard and pointing to her fat ass sitting uselessly on a chair, as if her fucking parents don’t even know what she looks like.

Missy tries to finish her glass of wine before her parents and Grey get to her. Her mom still spots it. Her mom still tuts her tongue disapprovingly and says, “Bee! You will make the baby retarded!”

She mutters, “Oh my God.”

Her dad touches her cheek. Her dad says, “How are you feeling _today?”_ He’s putting extra emphasis on today, because one time he asked her about how she was feeling, and she randomly chewed him out for making her feel like she has to be okay _all the time._

“I’m fine, Daddy!” she says, trying to sound cheerful.

Grey is shaking his head at her father — subtly, but also not. His eyes are dark and his face is stony. He is trying to silently tell her dad that she has been _the fucking worst_ lately.

Grey’s face makes her dad laugh.

She reaches up to Grey. She says, “I need to pee again.”

He springs right to it. Her mom tries to get in on this action — _why,_ Missy doesn’t even fucking know — so she has to tell her mom to relax, she’s okay, Grey has this covered. He helps her go pee all the fucking time. They have a system down.

Cramped tightly in his parents’ guest bathroom, as he pulls down her panties, Grey mutters to her, “Tarra was telling me about the alignment of stars during the time of your due date. She says our baby will be a warrior.”

Missy says, “Oh, God, were you mean to her?” as she gingerly sits down with his help. “You know she’s sensitive.”

“Man, I told her the truth politely,” he grumbles, as he leans against the opposite wall, waiting for her to finish peeing. “I told her that she only believes in astrology because she’s uneducated.”

“Grey!”

“Baby. I’m joking.” He is hiding his grin behind his palm. “I actually said nothing. I just nodded.”

 

 

  
For months, they discuss the merits of giving their child an ethnic name versus giving their child the name of colonizers and slavers. After a certain point, Grey becomes shockingly apathetic about it. He tells everyone that he just wants his kid to be employable later on in life, and a white name will help her with this. He refers to himself as a model — or a cautionary tale. He tells the peanut gallery that when he was little, he had only one name. But then he started preschool and all the children gave him shit about his name because they couldn’t pronounce it. They kept asking him why he was so weird and dark. Even his teacher was saying his name all crazy. He came home repeatedly crying about it like a little bitch, and it was affecting him enough that his parents — who didn’t have to deal with this problem with Azzie because Azzie is just naturally more confident in himself — just decided to tell all the white people in Grey’s young life to call him Grey. It’s a fucking color. Even dumb little children get that. Easy!

Jaime is horrified by this story. Because this is the first time ever in their friendship that Jaime realizes that ‘Grey’ is not Grey’s _real name._ Jaime feels like a stupid moron because _of course_ ‘Grey’ is not Grey’s real name. And in embarrassment and because of white guilt, Jaime is like, “But your name is part of your culture! Your name is important!”

Grey rolls his eyes and is like, “Okay, relax, _Jaime._ I feel plenty tied to my culture without listening to a bunch of white people butcher my name.”

Missandei’s parents really want for them to give their child a family name — so a Naathi name that starts with an M.

Missy tells her parents that it wouldn’t be fair to Grey’s parents, if they choose a Naathi family name.

Her mom magnanimously offers up the middle name to Grey’s parents. She also excitedly points out that Grey and Missandei can just have a second child, and that child can have an Islander name. Her mom tells Missandei she will start praying to the gods, that they will gift Grey and Missandei with another baby soon.

Missy shakes her head. She is simultaneously grateful and also disappointed, that her pregnancy is the thing that her mom and she really bond over. It is the thing that makes her mom warm up to Grey. It’s the thing that helps her mom get over the fact that they are unmarried.

Like, Missy called this. She sadly predicted this.

And it’s still so amazing.

 

 

  
His fears about hating the baby and then murdering the baby were really unfounded. It turns out that . . . he kind of immediately is in love with the baby.

It’s actually Missandei who has all of these fantasies about murdering their daughter. When she tearfully admits this, Olenna and Dr. Mormont put her back on her antidepressants and start monitoring her closely. For the first few weeks after giving birth, she cries despondently a lot. She feels so lost. She feels a lot of regret. She feels empty inside, like she will never connect to this new person that is going to be a part of her for-fucking-ever. She worries a lot about being a shitty mother a lot and ruining this person with her own mental hang-ups. She worries a lot about giving this person a shitty genetic mix, just fucking up with person with loads of health issues. She prays to the gods that she doesn’t believe in, that their kid will have Grey’s immune system.

Grey likes to joke that the kid is totally fucked, mental health-wise. The kid will probably have anxiety issues, either from genetics or just from conditioning.

She doesn’t understand why he thinks this is a joke. She doesn’t understand why he thinks this is funny. She doesn’t understand it _at all._

She also feels jealous a lot — that Grey is so naturally amazing with their daughter. She watches him take over a lot of the responsibility of caregiving — both her and the baby — and she sometimes just cries over that because she probably doesn’t deserve him. And she’s useless and is forcing him to do all of the things he hates — like constantly soothing a crying child and a crying adult woman.

She tiredly holds their baby in her arms, breastfeeding, as he sleepily stands over her, presumably around so she doesn’t accidentally lose her mind and kill their baby in a fit of depression and rage.

He is smiling.

She dully tells him, “Your jokes really aren’t funny sometimes. You’re such an asshole sometimes.”

He leans over and kisses her. He softly says, “Sorry.” He also says, “You love it,” as he straightens back up.

 

 

  
Things turn completely around after she’s fully ramped back up on her antidepressant. When the baby is two months old, Missandei is _obsessed_ with and in love with this already-brilliant little person. She’s holding their child firmly in her arms and talking to him as he gets ready for work — his paternity leave starts in a month. And then . . . they are not sure yet. She is really tempted to ask one of the grandparents if they want to like, watch their child. It’s very normal in their cultures. But she wants her dad to enjoy his retirement. She wants Grey’s parents to relax and travel together. But she also doesn’t want a fucking expensive stranger to watch her kid, what the fuck?

Her brothers have wives who were stay-at-home moms. So they helpfully tell her to just fucking be a good mother and stay home with her child who needs her.

She is still prone to moments of pure terror. She still gets arrested by all of the things she must be doing wrong sometimes. Also, _fuck her brothers._

She kisses and sniffs their daughter’s milky head. She says, “What if I quit my job and stay home for a couple of years?”

He is tying his tie. He is staring into a mirror as he says, “Um, I don’t fucking think so. That’s not the deal, Missandei. The deal is you get your ass back to work ASAP, and you make that money.”

He’s joking. This is actually an ongoing conversation that they keep agonizing over. He just knows that her entire family is pressuring her to quit her job, and the guilt of being away from the baby is really stressing her out. He just knows she needs one lone voice of reason, telling his bitch to keep her ass employed and upwardly mobile. He keeps pointing to his mother. He keeps using his mother as a model. He tries not to do it too much when Missandei’s mom is around, because that woman still sometimes wants to stab him in the heart for his bullshit influence on her daughter, but he keeps telling Missandei that he used to miss his mom all the fucking time when he was little because of course he did. But then he got over it. And now he fucking is grateful for all of the sacrifices his mom made for her family. Because it _is_ a sacrifice to be apart from each other sometimes. And — she sacrificed herself and deferred her dream so that her husband can go to med school — for the kids.

He says, “We don’t have to do the same kind of shit. Because, I’m dead inside. I have no dreams or aspirations beyond what I already have. So . . . what I’m saying is that I will pay for law school, if you want to do that.”

She laughs. She tries to kick him a little bit, carefully cradling the baby to her chest as she does so.

He kisses the both of them before he leaves for work. Reluctantly. Because he really doesn’t want to go, either.

And this is why they keep talking about childcare only in regard to her. It’s because he makes too much money, and they are really into all of the organic baby food and the cloth diaper service that his salary buys. He has to keep making money so they can keep on living their lavish upper middle class lifestyle and probably eventually send their baby to a private school and an elite college, where he will pressure her into becoming maybe a doctor. And she will resent him for it and will become something like . . . dear God, a college dropout slash diving instructor.

That’s another thing they are already fucking agonizing over like a couple of lunatics — whether or not to send their two-month-old daughter to private school with rich white kids — or leave her to slum it in public school with other kids of color and maybe get teenage-pregnant because some fucking asshole named Jamal hits puberty early and tells her that he loves her so much he just needs to stick his penis inside of her or else he’ll die.

They have been having the wildest, craziest, most paranoid, most problematic conversations lately. Yara likes to derail their paranoia by reminding them that their little girl might be super gay. Then the teenage pregnancy thing is moot.

He kisses Missandei on the mouth. He says, “Motherfucker, I love you.”

She makes a face — like she doesn’t think he should be calling her motherfucker like that. But she also melts and says, “I love you more.”

He casually says, “Nah,” before he bends down further and looks into the tiny face of the person that they made together. He presses his face into her really soft, really chubby baby cheek. She fucking smells better than anything ever. He kisses her about six times, squishily and adoringly and goofily, before he finally pulls away to look into a face that looks a lot like his — and he says to her, “I love you so, so much. A little more than I love your mommy.”

“Okay, is that really necessary?”

Missy knows he is just baiting her. She knows from the way he is slyly smiling at her.

Another thing they have been agonizing over like a couple of fucking insane people — is that they’ve been obsessing over _when_ to have another one. If it’s possible to become addicted to having babies — he’s probably already caught some of that. She is the voice of reason. She has been telling him that her vagina is still fucking busted — _hello?_ — so maybe they can table this conversation until after she actually feels like having sex with him again, until maybe after their current child can like, hold up the weight of her own head? She has told him that she didn’t expect for him to turn into the kind of man that just wants to keep her barefoot and pregnant — a joking accusation that often gets him all up in his feelings.

“You’re going to be late,” she tells him, bouncing their baby a little so she’s sitting higher.

“Text me and let me know if you want me to come home for lunch, okay?”

“You’re going to come home anyway, freak,” she tells him. “I don’t need to text you to feed your delusion.”

“Babe, I can’t wait for paternity leave. The house is going to be so clean.”

“Grey, I don’t think you will be able to watch the baby and clean as much as you want to.”

“Miss, chill. You’ll see. Imma show you how to parent better.”

It’s so awful, but he actually still makes her laugh all the time. Around her tired chuckling, she still manages to tell him, “Shut up. God, you’re so annoying.”

 

 

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] She and He](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582885) by [kalipersephone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalipersephone/pseuds/kalipersephone)




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